Remove characters before first appearance of specified character, column dataframe, R

Question

for every row I would like all numbers before the first 5 to be deleted eg second row: 1 5 5 5 --> 5 5 5 but first row should stay the same as it starts with a 5. I have tried with gsub but it only gives me empty strings.

gsub(".*5", "",xy.list)

Any help is appreciated!

structure(list(data_rel1 = c("5 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", 
"1 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", 
"1 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "2 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", 
"1 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "3 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", 
"5 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "4 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", 
"3 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", 
"5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", 
"1 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", 
"1 5 5 5", "1 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5", "5 5 5 5")), row.names = c(NA, 
-50L), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"))

Answer 1

You can try sub like this

transform(
  df,
  data_rel1 = sub(".*?(5.*)", "\\1", data_rel1)
)

which gives

   data_rel1
1    5 5 5 5
2      5 5 5
3      5 5 5
4      5 5 5
5      5 5 5
6    5 5 5 5
7      5 5 5
8      5 5 5
9    5 5 5 5
10     5 5 5
11     5 5 5
12     5 5 5
13   5 5 5 5
14   5 5 5 5
15     5 5 5
16     5 5 5
17     5 5 5
18   5 5 5 5
19     5 5 5
20   5 5 5 5
21   5 5 5 5
22   5 5 5 5
23     5 5 5
24     5 5 5
25     5 5 5
26     5 5 5
27   5 5 5 5
28     5 5 5
29     5 5 5
30   5 5 5 5
31   5 5 5 5
32   5 5 5 5
33   5 5 5 5
34   5 5 5 5
35   5 5 5 5
36   5 5 5 5
37   5 5 5 5
38     5 5 5
39   5 5 5 5
40     5 5 5
41   5 5 5 5
42     5 5 5
43   5 5 5 5
44   5 5 5 5
45     5 5 5
46     5 5 5
47     5 5 5
48   5 5 5 5
49   5 5 5 5
50   5 5 5 5

Answer 2

Or can use str_remove to match characters that are not 5 ( [^5]+ ) from the start ( ^ ) of the string

library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
df %>%
    mutate(data_rel1 = str_remove(data_rel1, '^[^5]+'))