Extracting the last n characters from a string in R

If you don't mind using the stringr package, str_sub is handy because you can use negatives to count backward:

x <- "some text in a string"
str_sub(x,-6,-1)
[1] "string"

Or, as Max points out in a comment to this answer,

str_sub(x, start= -6)
[1] "string"

Use stri_sub function from stringi package. To get substring from the end, use negative numbers. Look below for the examples:

stri_sub("abcde",1,3)
[1] "abc"
stri_sub("abcde",1,1)
[1] "a"
stri_sub("abcde",-3,-1)
[1] "cde"

You can install this package from github: https://github.com/Rexamine/stringi

It is available on CRAN now, simply type

install.packages("stringi")

to install this package.

str = 'This is an example'
n = 7
result = substr(str,(nchar(str)+1)-n,nchar(str))
print(result)

> [1] "example"
> 

I'm not aware of anything in base R, but it's straight-forward to make a function to do this using substr and nchar:

x <- "some text in a string"

substrRight <- function(x, n){
  substr(x, nchar(x)-n+1, nchar(x))
}

substrRight(x, 6)
[1] "string"

substrRight(x, 8)
[1] "a string"

---

This is vectorised, as @mdsumner points out. Consider:

x <- c("some text in a string", "I really need to learn how to count")
substrRight(x, 6)
[1] "string" " count"