How to Extract String Between Specific Characters in R

You can use the following methods to extract a string between specific characters in R:

Method 1: Extract String Between Specific Characters Using Base R

 gsub(".*char1 (.+) char2.*", "\\1", my_string)

Method 2: Extract String Between Specific Characters Using stringr

library(stringr)

str_match(my_string, "char1\\s*(.*?)\\s*char2")[,2]

Both of these examples extract the string between the characters char1 and char2 within my_string.

The following examples show how to use each method in practice with the following data frame:

#create data frame
df <- data.frame(team=c('team Mavs pro', 'team Heat pro', 'team Nets pro'),
                 points=c(114, 135, 119))

#view data frame
df

           team points
1 team Mavs pro    114
2 team Heat pro    135
3 team Nets pro    119

Example 1: Extract String Between Specific Characters Using Base R

The following code shows how to extract the string between the characters team and pro for each row in the team column of the data frame:

#create new column that extracts string between team and pro
df$team_name <- gsub(".*team (.+) pro.*", "\\1", df$team)

#view updated data frame
df

           team points team_name
1 team Mavs pro    114      Mavs
2 team Heat pro    135      Heat
3 team Nets pro    119      Nets

Notice that the new column called team_name contains the string between the characters team and pro for each row in the team column of the data frame.

Related: An Introduction to gsub() in R

Example 2: Extract String Between Specific Characters Using stringr Package

The following code shows how to extract the string between the characters team and pro for each row in the team column of the data frame by using the str_match() function from the stringr package in R:

library(stringr)

#create new column that extracts string between team and pro
df$team_name <- str_match(df$team, "team\\s*(.*?)\\s*pro")[,2]

#view updated data frame
df

           team points team_name
1 team Mavs pro    114      Mavs
2 team Heat pro    135      Heat
3 team Nets pro    119      Nets

Notice that the new column called team_name contains the string between the characters team and pro for each row in the team column of the data frame.

This matches the results from using the gsub() function in base R.

Note that the str_match() function returns a matrix in which the first column contains the original strings and the second column contains the substring we’re interested in.

Thus, we must use [,2] to extract only the second column from the matrix returned by the str_match() function.