Removing last part of a field in QGIS attribute table, not the same length of cells

Question

I got a question regarding removing and/or creating a new field just with the 4 first characters of a field. Whenever I search for this I just find answers about how to remove a specific number of values from the front or the back, the problem here is that I have fields with a 4 digit number and then different names! like for example "2481 New York" and the next one "4521 Seattle" and I want a new field with only the first digits!

FSimardGIS · Answer

There are a few possible options to achieve the desired result.
You could use a substring function to extract the first 4 characters:
substr("YourFieldName",1,4)

Another possibility is to use the following regex function which extracts numbers appearing at the beginning of a string:
regexp_substr("YourFieldName",'^d+')

The advantage of the last one is that it can handle cases with varying number lengths.
I recommend to test this in a new field first before potentially updating your actual field, to check that the result is as you intended.

Removing last part of a field in QGIS attribute table, not the same length of cells

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