Getting and removing the first character of a string

I would like to do some 2-dimensional walks using strings of characters by assigning different values to each character. I was planning to 'pop' the first character of a string, use it, and repeat for the rest of the string.

How can I achieve something like this?

x <- 'hello stackoverflow'

I'd like to be able to do something like this:

a <- x.pop[1]

print(a)

'h'
print(x)

'ello stackoverflow'

See ?substring.

x <- 'hello stackoverflow'
substring(x, 1, 1)
## [1] "h"
substring(x, 2)
## [1] "ello stackoverflow"

---

The idea of having a pop method that both returns a value and has a side effect of updating the data stored in x is very much a concept from object-oriented programming. So rather than defining a pop function to operate on character vectors, we can make a reference class with a pop method.

PopStringFactory <- setRefClass(
  "PopString",
  fields = list(
    x = "character"  
  ),
  methods = list(
    initialize = function(x)
    {
      x <<- x
    },
    pop = function(n = 1)
    {
      if(nchar(x) == 0)
      {
        warning("Nothing to pop.")
        return("")
      }
      first <- substring(x, 1, n)
      x <<- substring(x, n + 1)
      first
    }
  )
)

x <- PopStringFactory$new("hello stackoverflow")
x
## Reference class object of class "PopString"
## Field "x":
## [1] "hello stackoverflow"
replicate(nchar(x$x), x$pop())
## [1] "h" "e" "l" "l" "o" " " "s" "t" "a" "c" "k" "o" "v" "e" "r" "f" "l" "o" "w"

There is also str_sub from the stringr package

x <- 'hello stackoverflow'
str_sub(x, 2) # or
str_sub(x, 2, str_length(x))
[1] "ello stackoverflow"

Use this function from stringi package

> x <- 'hello stackoverflow'
> stri_sub(x,2)
[1] "ello stackoverflow"

substring is definitely best, but here's one strsplit alternative, since I haven't seen one yet.

> x <- 'hello stackoverflow'
> strsplit(x, '')[[1]][1]
## [1] "h"

or equivalently

> unlist(strsplit(x, ''))[1]
## [1] "h"

And you can paste the rest of the string back together.

> paste0(strsplit(x, '')[[1]][-1], collapse = '')
## [1] "ello stackoverflow"

removing first characters:

x <- 'hello stackoverflow'
substring(x, 2, nchar(x))

Idea is select all characters starting from 2 to number of characters in x. This is important when you have unequal number of characters in word or phrase.

Selecting the first letter is trivial as previous answers:

substring(x,1,1)

Another alternative is to use capturing sub-expressions with the regular expression functions regmatches and regexec.

# the original example
x <- 'hello stackoverflow'

# grab the substrings
myStrings <- regmatches(x, regexec('(^.)(.*)', x))

This returns the entire string, the first character, and the "popped" result in a list of length 1.

myStrings
[[1]]
[1] "hello stackoverflow" "h"                   "ello stackoverflow" 

which is equivalent to list(c(x, substr(x, 1, 1), substr(x, 2, nchar(x)))). That is, it contains the super set of the desired elements as well as the full string.

---

Adding sapply will allow this method to work for a character vector of length > 1.

# a slightly more interesting example
xx <- c('hello stackoverflow', 'right back', 'at yah')

# grab the substrings
myStrings <- regmatches(x, regexec('(^.)(.*)', xx))

This returns a list with the matched full string as the first element and the matching subexpressions captured by () as the following elements. So in the regular expression '(^.)(.*)', (^.) matches the first character and (.*) matches the remaining characters.

myStrings
[[1]]
[1] "hello stackoverflow" "h"                   "ello stackoverflow" 

[[2]]
[1] "right back" "r"          "ight back" 

[[3]]
[1] "at yah" "a"      "t yah" 

Now, we can use the trusty sapply + [ method to pull out the desired substrings.

myFirstStrings <- sapply(myStrings, "[", 2)
myFirstStrings
[1] "h" "r" "a"
mySecondStrings <- sapply(myStrings, "[", 3)
mySecondStrings
[1] "ello stackoverflow" "ight back"          "t yah"

Another way using the sub function.

 sub('(^.).*', '\\1', 'hello stackoverflow')
 [1] "h"

 sub('(^.)(.*)', '\\2', 'hello stackoverflow')
 [1] "ello stackoverflow"