R Function 查找并删除具有给定数值范围的字符串

Question

I have a column named "edited_address" in a df named CB_Edit. In "edited_address" column there are a multitude of addresses. Some addresses include a variable ("L#") which I want to completely remove from all of them which possess it. For instance:

edited_address:

100 S Smith Street
200 S Smith L100 Street
300 S Smith Street
400 S L1 Smith Street
500 S Smith Street L999
600 N Jacobs Blvd
900 L53 Cascades Street

I want to remove the "L#" from the column. There are two problems. The first is that the L followed by the number range anywhere from 0-9999. The second is that the L# can be anywhere in the column cell. Let me know what I can do, thank you!

I have tried several gsub functions, expecting to capture everything in the range. That did not happen.

Answer 1

We can use the following approach with sub() , for a base R option:

df$edited_address <- gsub("^\\s+|\\s+$", "", sub("\\s*\\bL\\d{1,4}\\b\\s*", " ", df$edited_address))
df

      edited_address
1 100 S Smith Street
2 200 S Smith Street
3 300 S Smith Street
4 400 S Smith Street
5 500 S Smith Street