[Solved] Add leading zeros before first hypen [closed]

by


We can use sub to extract the numbers before the first - by matching the - followed by one or more characters (.*) till the end of the string, replace it with "", convert it to numeric (as.numeric), as well as extract the substring from the first instance of - till the end of the string by matching one or more characters that are not a - ([^-]+) from the start of the string, replace it with "". Use these substrings as arguments in sprintf with the correct fmt to paste it together.

df1$V1 <- sprintf("%06d%s", as.numeric(sub("\\-.*", "", df1$V1)), sub("^[^-]+", "", df1$V1))
df1
#               V1
#1  000098-45.3A-22
#2  000104-44.0A-23
#3   000983-29.1-22
#4  001757-42.5A-22
#5 004968-37.3A2-23

We can also do this in a single step using gsubfn. Here, we match the numbers (\\d+) at the start (^) of the string, capture it as a group, in the replacement, convert that the captured group into numeric and change the format with sprintf

library(gsubfn)
gsubfn("^(\\d+)", ~sprintf("%06d", as.numeric(x)), df1$V1)
#[1] "000098-45.3A-22"  "000104-44.0A-23"  "000983-29.1-22"   
#[4] "001757-42.5A-22"  "004968-37.3A2-23"

data

df1 <- structure(list(V1 = c("98-45.3A-22", "104-44.0A-23", "983-29.1-22", 
"1757-42.5A-22", "4968-37.3A2-23")), .Names = "V1", class = "data.frame", 
row.names = c(NA, -5L))

solved Add leading zeros before first hypen [closed]