I have a file containing a certain number of lines. Each line looks like this:
TF_list_to_test10004/Nus_k0.345_t0.1_e0.1.adj:PKMYT1
I would like to remove all before ":" character in order to retain only PKMYT1 that is a gene name. Since I'm not an expert in regex scripting can anyone help me to do this using Unix (sed or awk) or in R?
Using sed:
sed 's/.*://' < your_input_file > output_file
This will replace anything followed by a colon with nothing, so it'll remove everything up to and including the last colon on each line (because * is greedy by default).
As per Josh O'Brien's comment, if you wanted to only replace up to and including the first colon, do this:
sed "s/[^:]*://"
That will match anything that isn't a colon, followed by one colon, and replace with nothing.
Note that for both of these patterns they'll stop on the first match on each line. If you want to make a replace happen for every match on a line, add the 'g' (global) option to the end of the command.
Also note that on linux (but not on OSX) you can edit a file in-place with -i eg:
sed -i 's/.*://' your_file
You can use awk like this:
awk -F: '{print $2}' /your/file
If you have GNU coreutils available use cut:
cut -d: -f2 infile