R - How do I remove a varying number of digits from a date-vector
assuming your strings are of the form [NUMBER][WHITESPACE][STUFF-TO-KEEP]

you can use regex, for example with the stringr package.

# construct strings
strings &lt;- paste(c(1,11,111,1111), "KEEP")
strings
[1] "1 KEEP"    "11 KEEP"   "111 KEEP"  "1111 KEEP"

stringr::str_remove(strings, "[0-9].* (?=[a-zA-Z])")
[1] "KEEP" "KEEP" "KEEP" "KEEP"


the regex "[0-9].* (?=[a-zA-Z])" expained:

'[0-9].* ' # (including the whitespace!) 
# matches any number of digigs from 0 to 9 followed by a whitespace

(?=[a-zA-Z]) 
# this is a lookahead group, so an additional requirement is,
# that a match is only used when the above match is followed
# by a letter in the alphabet, small(a-z) or large (A-Z)


of course, str_remove removes the matches string.