title: Character Extraction from String
body: <p>How would you extract all characters up to a specified character? For Example given, I would like to extract everything before the "." (period):</p>
  
  <pre><code>a&lt;-c("asdasd.sss","segssddfge.sss","se.sss")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I would like to get back:</p>
  
  <pre><code>asdasd segssddfge se
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>substr(a,1,".")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but it doesn't seem to work.</p>
  
  <p>any ideas?</p>