r - Extract date text from string

Question

I would like to extract date from the following list of text:

[[1]]
[1] "TAX INVOICE      28 Dec 2018       PO2222"

[[2]]
[1] "TAX INVOICE      20 Nov 2018       PO11111"

The result would be a list or a data frame:

 28-Dec-2018
 20-Nov-2018

Thanks

Answer 1

Here is a base R option using lapply and gsub:

lst <- list("TAX INVOICE      28 Dec 2018       PO2222",
            "TAX INVOICE      20 Nov 2018       PO11111")

lapply(lst, function(x) gsub(".*(\d{2} \w{3} \d{4}).*", "\1", x))
[[1]]
[1] "28 Dec 2018"

[[2]]
[1] "20 Nov 2018"

Demo