r - Remove part of a string

Question

How do I remove part of a string? For example in ATGAS_1121 I want to remove everything before _.

Answer 1

Use regular expressions. In this case, you can use gsub:

gsub("^.*?_","_","ATGAS_1121")
[1] "_1121"

This regular expression matches the beginning of the string (^), any character (.) repeated zero or more times (*), and underscore (_). The ? makes the match "lazy" so that it only matches are far as the first underscore. That match is replaced with just an underscore. See ?regex for more details and references