theBioBucket-Archives | R-Code used in my blog theBioBucket | Blog library

It looks like what you're doing is right and there is in fact a mistake in the tutorial. I tested the regex too, you can see it here. What the regex you are given is capturing any uppercase letter that may or may not be followed by a dot. For instance, "W." in "George W. Bush" is substituted with "W", but "i.e." is not captured and substituted because none of the characters are capitalized. If we had "I.E." it would get substituted with "IE". In order to capture the names given we need a different regex. One approach might be to capture the first name, middle initial, and last name. Now you could get the effect with the regex .*([A-Z][a-z]+)\s([A-Z])[.]+\s([A-Z][a-z]+).* see here or in R using