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I was looking at this question:

R: gsub, pattern = vector and replacement = vector

I am trying a simple example and I can't get it to work.

testList <- c("apple", "orange", "banana1", "apple4", "orange 8", "banana 10")

repl <- c("apple", "orange", "banana")

pat <- paste0("^", repl, "[[:space:]]*[[:digit:]]*$")

result <- mgsub(pat, repl, testList)

Shouldn't this output:

"apple", "orange", "banana", "apple", "orange", "banana"
Tyler Rinker
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confused_programmer
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1 Answers1

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You need to specify fixed = FALSE, the default is TRUE, which replaces the pattern as is and doesn't use regex:

result <- mgsub(pat, repl, testList, fixed = FALSE)
result
# [1] "apple"  "orange" "banana" "apple"  "orange" "banana"
Psidom
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