Remove part of string after "."
We can pretend they are filenames and remove extensions:
tools::file_path_sans_ext(a)
# [1] "NM_020506" "NM_020519" "NM_001030297" "NM_010281" "NM_011419" "NM_053155"
If the string should be of fixed length, then substr
from base R
can be used. But, we can get the position of the .
with regexpr
and use that in substr
substr(a, 1, regexpr("\\.", a)-1)
#[1] "NM_020506" "NM_020519" "NM_001030297" "NM_010281" "NM_011419" "NM_053155"
You just need to escape the period:
a <- c("NM_020506.1","NM_020519.1","NM_001030297.2","NM_010281.2","NM_011419.3", "NM_053155.2")
gsub("\\..*","",a)
[1] "NM_020506" "NM_020519" "NM_001030297" "NM_010281" "NM_011419" "NM_053155"
You could do:
sub("*\\.[0-9]", "", a)
or
library(stringr)
str_sub(a, start=1, end=-3)