Replace text values in a vector

Question

Here's my data :

dataset <- c("h", "H", "homme", "masculin", "f", "femme", "épouse")

How can I replace text values of the vector like :

• "femme" -> "f"
• "épouse" ->"f"
• "Homme"-> "h"
• "masculin" -> "h"

What I tried for "femme" -> "f"

test_out <- sapply(dataset, switch,
         "f"="femme")
test_out 

Expected result :

  "h"        "h"        "h"    "masculin" "f"        "f"    "f"  

Answer 1

Try gsub with regular expressions:

 dataset = gsub("^((?!h).*)$", "f", gsub("^((h|H|m).*)$", "h", dataset), perl=TRUE)