How to get first n characters from a string in R

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the first n characters from a string in the R language.

Getting the first n characters

To get the first n characters from a string, we can use the built-in substr() function in R.

The substr() function takes 3 arguments, the first one is a string, the second is start position, third is end position.

Here is an example, that gets the first 2 characters from a string:

name = 'orange'
firstTwo = substr(name,1,2)
print(firstTwo)

Output:

[1] "or"

Note: The negative values count backward from the last character.

You can also get the first 3 characters of a string like this:

name = 'orange'
firstThree = substr(name,1,3)
print(firstThree)

Output:

[1] "ora"