I'm trying to extract the first word of that name, but I'm not able to because R is not recognizing whitespace.

library(stringr)

name <- x[76,3]
name
[1] "Byrsonima crispa A.Juss."

word(name,1)
[1] "Byrsonima crispa A.Juss."

str_count(name," ")
[1] 0

CodePudding user response：

You need to specify white space as Regex pattern:

str_count("Byrsonima crispa A.Juss.", "\\s")
#[1] 2