How to delete the second word of a value in a row?

[niko_bio]

Hi.

I'm trying to delete the second word of all my rows that contain two words. So for example, if a row has the value: "Argynnis childreni", I want the code to remove the second word so that I get the result "Argynnis".

Any ideas?

Here's some data. Specifically, I want to remove the 2nd word of all rows of the "species" column.

data.frame(
stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
species = c("Abraxaphantes sp",
"Abraxas sp","Acraea issoria","Actias sp","Agalope sp",
"Amesia sp"),
Individuals = c(2, 4, 19, 11, 7, 6),
Group = c("Other", "Other", "Butterfly", "Other", "Other", "Other"),
Group2 = c("insects/moths",
"insects/moths",NA,"insects/moths","insects/moths","insects/moths")
)

Thank you!!

[williaml]

Like this perhaps? I've put it in a new column - it removes the second word:

library(tidyverse)

df %>% 
  mutate(species2 = str_remove(species, "(\\s+\\w+)"))


           species Individuals     Group        Group2      species2
1 Abraxaphantes sp           2     Other insects/moths Abraxaphantes
2       Abraxas sp           4     Other insects/moths       Abraxas
3   Acraea issoria          19 Butterfly          <NA>        Acraea
4        Actias sp          11     Other insects/moths        Actias
5       Agalope sp           7     Other insects/moths       Agalope
6        Amesia sp           6     Other insects/moths        Amesia

[nirgrahamuk]

is it a possibility that the species might be 3 words ?

[niko_bio]

Yes, exactly like that. Thank you very much.

[niko_bio]

Yeah it is, but not in this particular case.