r - Character Extraction from String

Question

How would you extract all characters up to a specified character? For Example given, I would like to extract everything before the "." (period):

a<-c("asdasd.sss","segssddfge.sss","se.sss")

I would like to get back:

asdasd segssddfge se

I tried:

substr(a,1,".")

but it doesn't seem to work.

any ideas?

Answer 1

Here's a very basic approach:

sapply(strsplit(a, "\."), `[[`, 1)
# [1] "asdasd"     "segssddfge" "se"

And another:

sub(".sss", "", a, fixed = TRUE)
# [1] "asdasd"     "segssddfge" "se" 
## OR sub("(.*)\..*", "\1", a) 
## And possibly other variations