Remove Characters from a Column

[Irakli]

I have a vector of numbers with few values containing characters:

[1] "8" "3" "3" "7" "1" "7" "4" "2" "5" "4" "3" "3" "3"
[14] "8" "3" "5" "1" "1" "3" "5" "1" "1" "5" "2" "4" "9"
[27] "3" "8" "5" "3" "0" "3" "4" "1" "5" "3" "2" "3" "6"
[40] "9" "6" "8 წლის" "3" "6" "5" "2 წლის" "2" "2" "6 clis" "4" "7" "3"
[53] "8" "8" "8" "3" "4"

How do I remove the characters to leave only the numbers and at the same time (if applicable) convert the column to numeric?

[FJCC]

If your numbers always precede the characters, this should work.

library(stringr)
VEC <- c(1,2,3,"4ER","5ERT",1)
VEC
#> [1] "1"    "2"    "3"    "4ER"  "5ERT" "1"
NewVec <- str_extract(VEC,"^\\d+")
NewVec <- as.numeric(NewVec)
NewVec
#> [1] 1 2 3 4 5 1

^{Created on 2021-01-15 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}