删除带有 2 个字母后跟 2 个数字的字母数字

Question

a <- c("it is ZZ10ASDJN123 and ZZ100DD22")

How can i remove the words starting with first 2 alphabets followed by starting 2 digit numbers and not remove any alphanumeric more than follows 2 + digit numbers.

Expected output:

"it is and ZZ100DD22"

This code removes the numbers alone. Please help in geting me the expected output.

gsub('[[:digit:]]+', '', a)

Answer 1

You may use

gsub("\\s*\\b[A-Za-z]{2}\\d{2}(?!\\d)\\w*\\b", "", a, perl=TRUE)

See the regex demo . An alternative:

gsub("\\s*\\b[A-Za-z]{2}\\d{2}[A-Za-z_]\\w*\\b", "", a)

Details

• \\s* - 0 or more whitespace chars
• \\b - a word boundary
• [A-Za-z]{2} - two ASCII letters (use \\p{L} to match any Unicode letters)
• \\d{2} - two digits
• (?!\\d) - there can be no digit immediately to the right
• \\w* - 0 or more letters, digits or underscores
• \\b - word boundary.

Add (*UCP) at the start of the regex to make it fully Uniocde-aware.

R demo :

a <- c("it is ZZ10ASDJN123 and ZZ100DD22")
gsub("\\s*\\b[A-Za-z]{2}\\d{2}(?!\\d)\\w*", "", a, perl=TRUE)
## => [1] "it is and ZZ100DD22"