On Jul 10, 2013, at 12:02 AM, Gundala Viswanath wrote: > I have the following list of strings: > > name <- c("hsa-miR-555p","hsa-miR-519b-3p","hsa-let-7a") > > What I want to do is for each of the above strings > replace the text after second delimiter with "zzz". > Yielding: > > hsa-miR-zzz > hsa-miR-zzz > hsa-let-zzz
?regex Look at sections on character classe, repetition quantifiers, and back references. > sub("(^[^-]*-[^-]*-)(.*$)", "\\1zzz", name) [1] "hsa-miR-zzz" "hsa-miR-zzz" "hsa-let-zzz" -- David Winsemius Alameda, CA, USA ______________________________________________ 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.