regex - Use gsub remove all string before first white space in R

Question

I have a data frame like this:

name         weight
r apple         0.5
y pear          0.4
y cherry        0.1
g watermelon    5.0
pp grape        0.5
y apple pear    0.4
...  ...

I would like to remove all characters before the first white space in the name column. Can anybody give me a favor? Thank you!

Answer 1

Try this:

sub(".*? ", "", D$name)

Edit:

The pattern is looking for any character zero or more times (.*) up until the first space, and then capturing the one or more characters ((.+)) after that first space. The ? after .* makes it "lazy" rather than "greedy" and is what makes it stop at the first space found. So, the .*? matches everything before the first space, the space matches the first space found.