Parsing age and gender into pieces

To finish up, you need to pull out the individual pieces and tidy them into usable variables.

There are a few ways you could get at one piece: you could extract out the piece you need, you could replace everything that isn't the piece you need with "", or you could try to split into the pieces you need. You'll try a few of these in this exercise and you'll see yet another way in the next chapter. For the first option, stringr has a nice convenience function, str_remove(), that works like str_replace() with replacement = "".

One benefit of building up your pattern in pieces is you already have patterns for each part that you can reuse now.