r - gsub extract two words

Question

I cannot get my head around gsub(). If text is:

 text <- "Genus_species_1652_NL"

How would I extract to get

"Genus species"

Thanks. This is a useful link but I havnt been able to sort it http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/SvetlanaEdenRFiles/regExprTalk.pdf

Answer 1

You can do this like:

> gsub('([A-z]+)_([A-z]+)_.*', '\\1 \\2', text)
[1] "Genus species"

but as mentioned in a comment, a tool like strsplit may be more useful.