R get first letters of double/tripple-barrel surnames in data.frame - regex

Question

I have a dataframe with 2 columns:
> df1
Surname Name
1 The Builder Bob
2 Zeta-Jones Catherine
I want to add a third column "Shortened_Surname" which contains the first letters of all the words in the surname field:
Surname Name Shortened_Surname
1 The Builder Bob TB
2 Zeta-Jones Catherine ZJ
Note the "-" in the second name. I have barreled surnames separated by spaces and hyphens.
I have tried:
Step1:
> strsplit(unlist(as.character(df1$Surname))," ")
[[1]]
[1] "The" "Builder"
[[2]]
[1] "Zeta-Jones"
My research suggests I could possibly use strtrim as a Step 2, but all I have found is a number of ways how not to do it.

Answer 1

You can target the space, hyphen, and beginning of the line with lookarounds. For instance, you any character (.) not preceded by the beginning of the line, a space, or a hyphen should be substituted to "":
with(df, gsub("(?<!^|[ -]).", "", Surname, perl=TRUE))
[1] "TB" "ZJ"
or
with(df, gsub("(?<=[^ -]).", "", Surname, perl=TRUE))
The second gsub substitutes a blank ("") for any character that is preceded by a character that is not a " " or "-".

Answer 2

You can try this, if the format of the names is as show in the input data:
library(stringr)
df$Shortened_Surname <- sapply(str_extract_all(df$Surname, '[A-Z]{1}'), function(x) paste(x, collapse = ''))
Output is as follows:
Surname Name Shortened_Surname
1 The Builder Bob TB
2 Zeta-Jones Catherine ZJ
If the format of the names is somewhat inconsistent, you will need to modify the above pattern to capture that. You can use |, & operators inside the pattern to combine multiple patterns.