String after and before character-CodePudding

I have this string

x = "Hello   how are    you Peter /"

And I would like to get only

x = "Peter"

I would like to find patter that extract only word after "you" and before "/" (exluded)

I would like to use something like

x = sub(" you*/.", "", x)

But I dont know how to make the pattern correctly.

CodePudding user response：

gsub(".*you (.*) /$", "\\1", x)

CodePudding user response：

library(stringr)
str_match(x, "you\\s*(.*?)\\s*\\/")[, 2]
#[1] "Peter"

CodePudding user response：

With lookahead and lookbehind:

library(stringr)
x = "Hello   how are    you Peter /"
str_extract(x,"(?<=you )\\w (?= /)")
[1] "Peter"

If you want to be a bit more robust to spaces (if there is or not a space after the name for example, the example above will not work):

str_extract(x,"(?<=you)[\\w ] (?=/)") %>% 
trimws()