How to remove last n characters of a string in R

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

Removing the last n characters

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

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

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

month = 'august'
result = substring(month, 1, nchar(month)-3)
print(result)

Output:

"aug"

In the example above, we have passed the 1, nchar(month)-3 as a second and third arguments to the substring() function. so it starts the extraction at position 1 and extracts up to the nchar(month)-3 of a string.

The nchar() function is used to caluclate the length of a string in R.

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