If this is really the case you are dealing with, wouldn't strsplit do the job more easily?
On Jan 8, 2008, at 5:47 PM, Thomas Pujol wrote: > I have a text string "test.a..34" > > I wish to extract the text that comes after ".." (e.g. "34"), and > the text that comes before ".." (e.g. "test.a"). > > What is a good way to do this? Also, can you help me understand > how to use "wildcards" such as "*" with sub, etc? > > > #This seems to work, but I am unclear how it works: > sub("\\*..", "", "test.a..34") > > #This does not work: > sub("\\*..", "", "test.a..34") > Those two lines look the same to me, and they don't work. Perhaps you wanted: sub("\\.\\.", "", "test.a..34") Have you looked at ?regex ? Haris Skiadas Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Hanover College ______________________________________________ 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.