How to remove the first n characters of a string in R

In this tutorial, we will learn how to remove the first n characters of a string in the R language.

Removing the first n characters

To remove the string’s first n characters, we can use the built-in substring() function in R.

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

Here is an example, that removes the first 3 characters from the month string:

month = 'august'
result = substring(month, 4)
print(result)

Output:

"ust"

In the example above, we have passed the 4 as a second argument to the substring() function. so it starts the extraction at position 2 and extracts the remaining part of the string.

The nchar() function helps us to caluclate the length of a string in R.

Note: The substring() function doesn’t modify the original string.