Remove part of a String in a column (R)

This will do the trick

playerValue <- "40,00 Mill. € "
as.numeric(gsub("^(\\d+?)\\,(\\d+?)\\s.*", "\\1.\\2", playerValue, perl = TRUE))
# returns
40

Short expl. of the regex:

• ^ tells it is the start of the string
• \\d+\\,\\d+ means there a two sequences of numbers separated by a comma. We extract the two sequences using parentheses
• \\s.* means after the second sequence comes a white space and after the space comes anything (nothing is also anything)
• \\1,\\2 are the grouping we want to extract and we separate them by a dot in order to convert them to numeric

Use gsub to replace anything after the space and also replace , to ., like this:

data$playerValue <- gsub(",", ".", gsub("[[:space:]].*", "", data$playerValue))

It will give you this output:

#         PlayerName           playerValue
#1     Michy Batshuayi               40.00
#2     Tiemoué Bakayoko              35.00  
#3     Kurt Zouma                    20.00  
#4     Kenedy                        10.00  
#5     Tammy Abraham                 10.00   
#6     Abdul Rahman Baba              8.00   
#7     Mario Pasalic                  8.00  
#8     Lewis Baker                    5.50  
#9     Ola Aina                       4.00   
#10    Tomas Kalas                    4.00   

This, if you want to convert it to a number, you can do it as follows:

data$playerValue <- as.numeric(data$playerValue)

Hope it helps.