How to remove specific characters from string in a column in R?

Question

I've got the following data.

df <- data.frame(Name = c("TOMTom Catch",
                          "BIBill Ronald",
                          "JEFJeffrey Wilson",
                          "GEOGeorge Sic",
                          "DADavid Irris"))

How do I clean the data in names column?

I've tried nchar and substring however some names need the first two characters removed where as other need the first three?

Answer 1

We can use regex lookaround patterns.

gsub("^[A-Z]+(?=[A-Z])", "", df$Name, perl = T)
#> [1] "Tom Catch"      "Bill Ronald"    "Jeffrey Wilson" "George Sic"    
#> [5] "David Irris"