How to remove last n characters from every element in the R vector

Here is an example of what I would do. I hope it’s what you’re looking for.

char_array = c("foo_bar","bar_foo","apple","beer")
a = data.frame("data"=char_array,"data2"=1:4)
a$data = substr(a$data,1,nchar(a$data)-3)

a should now contain:

  data data2
1 foo_ 1
2 bar_ 2
3   ap 3
4    b 4