Hi, Try: string1<- "Red, Romeo, Calf" string2<- "Red, Rome, Ralf" string3<- "China, Japan, USA" gsub("R[[:alpha:]]{1,}","MM",string3) #[1] "China, Japan, USA" gsub("R[[:alpha:]]{1,}","MM",string2) #[1] "MM, MM, MM" gsub("R[[:alpha:]]{1,}","MM",string1) #[1] "MM, MM, Calf"
Other way would be: paste(gsub("^R.*\\w+","MM",strsplit(string1, ", ")[[1]]),collapse=", ") #[1] "MM, MM, Calf" A.K. Hi all, I want to replace all words that begin with a given character with a different word. Tried gsub and str_replace_all but with little success. In this example I want to replace all words starting with R with MM. gsub replaces properly only once: > gsub("^R*\\w+", "MM", "Red, Rome, Ralf") [1] "MM, Rome, Ralf" Thanks in advance ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.