Extracting string inbetween two string patterns in R

Question

If I have a character vector:

 links <- c("http://fdsfdsfdsfsdaaa.com/t5/this/bd-p/fdsfsdfdsfscshdad/dasd",
            "http://ffdsfdddddfdf.com/t5/that/bd-p/fdsfdsfsddfjfsd")

I want to extract "this" and "that" knowing that they are between "t5" and "bd-p." Totally lost on this one.

Answer 1

Using sub :

sub(".*t5/(.*)/bd-p.*","\\1",links)
[1] "this" "that"

Answer 2

Try this:

lapply(regmatches(links, regexec("t5/(.*)/bd-p", links)), '[', 2)
[[1]]
[1] "this"

[[2]]
[1] "that"

regexec combined with regmatches is good for getting subexpressions (ie the stuff in the parentheses). regmatches will return the whole search string and the subexpression, which is why I extract only the second element, which is the subexpression.