Use gsub remove all string before first white space in R

I have a data frame like this:

name         weight
r apple         0.5
y pear          0.4
y cherry        0.1
g watermelon    5.0
pp grape        0.5
y apple pear    0.4
...  ...

I would like to remove all characters before the first white space in the name column. Can anybody give me a favor? Thank you!

Try this:

sub(".*? ", "", D$name)

Edit:

The pattern is looking for any character zero or more times (.*) up until the first space, and then capturing the one or more characters ((.+)) after that first space. The ? after .* makes it "lazy" rather than "greedy" and is what makes it stop at the first space found. So, the .*? matches everything before the first space, the space matches the first space found.

If D is your data frame, try

sub(".+? ", "", D$name)

Let's say your data frame is called 'df'

library(reshape2)    
df$name = colsplit(df$name," ", names = c("chuck","name"))[,2]

The following solution does not use gsub but it can be applied to a dataframe using a pipe operator %>%.

library(tidyverse)

# The data
df <- structure(list(name = c("r apple", "y pear", "y cherry", "g watermelon",
        "pp grape", "y apple pear"), weight = c(0.5, 0.4, 0.1, 5.0, 0.5, 0.4)),
        class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -6L))

# Remove the first characters preceding a white space in the column "name"
df2 <- df %>% 
        mutate(name = str_replace(name, "^\\S* ", ""))

The regular expression "^\\S* " search for all characters from the beginning of the string until the first white space.