Simpler, but would fail if there are more "."s beyond the second (it changes the last one to a "-"):
> sub("(.*)\\.([^.]*)", "\\1-\\2", "aa.bcv.cdg") [1] "aa.bcv-cdg" Bert Gunter "The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along and sticking things into it." -- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip ) On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 6:49 PM Bert Gunter <bgunter.4...@gmail.com> wrote: > > gsub("(.*\\.[^.]*)\\.(.*)","\\1-\\2", "aa.bcv.cdg") > [1] "aa.bcv-cdg" > > Cheers, > Bert > > Bert Gunter > > "The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along and > sticking things into it." > -- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip ) > > > On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 6:29 PM Rolf Turner <r.tur...@auckland.ac.nz> > wrote: > >> >> I want to deal with strings of the form "a.b.c" and to change (using >> sub() or whatever is appropriate) the second "." to a "-", i.e. to >> change "a.b.c" to "a.b-c". I want to leave the first "." as-is. >> >> I guess I could do a gsub(), changing all "."s to "-"s, and then do >> a sub() changing the first "-" back to a ".". But this seems very >> kludgy. There must be a sexier way. Mustn't there? Is there regular >> expression syntax for picking out the second occurence of a particular >> string? >> >> cheers, >> >> Rolf Turner >> >> -- >> Honorary Research Fellow >> Department of Statistics >> University of Auckland >> Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276 >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >> 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. >> > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.