Hi Simon, What you need are regular expressions.
The help for gsub says this, but in such a way that if you didn't know that's what you were looking for, you wouldn't learn it there: See the help pages on regular expression for details of the different types of regular expressions. The See Also section has a better clue: regular expression (aka ‘regexp’) for the details of the pattern specification. ?regexp has a fairly terse explanation. I'd look at some of the many guides to regular expressions online, and use ?regexp mainly for how the R implementation differs from standard (mostly in the use of \). The help page does list all the groups, which is what you wanted. Sarah On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Simon Pickert <simon.pick...@t-online.de> wrote: > Hi all, > > what are the placeholders for string operations/modifications? Is there a > placeholder for numbers, which would allow me to easily replace all numbers > in a string? Something like > > text1 <- c("this is a number 23%") > text2 <- c("this is not a number bla%") > > newtext1 <- gsub(#%, [percentagevalue], text) > newtext2 <- gsub(#%, [percentagevalue], text) > > > newtext1 should be "this is a number [percentagevalue]" > newtext2 should be "this is not a number 23%" > > > I figured there is * ? . but I can't find a source that explains their use > and lists other placeholders.. > > > Appreciate your help! > Thanks > Simon -- Sarah Goslee http://www.functionaldiversity.org ______________________________________________ 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.