replace element of string 3 - 10 positions after a pattern

Question

Ideally, in base R I need some kind of string manipulation that will let me detect a pattern and change the string 3 positions after the pattern.

    example <- "when string says SOMETHING = #c792ea"

desired output:

when string says SOMETHING = #001628

I have tried gsub but I am not sure how I can get it to replace the characters after a pattern.

Answer 1

If it based on the position of character, then we can use substring assignment

substring(example, 30) <- "#001628"
example
#[1] "when string says SOMETHING = #001628"

---

Or if we need to find the position of the word that starts with #

library(stringr)
posvec <- c(str_locate(example, "#\\w+"))
substring(example, posvec[1], posvec[2]) <- "#001628"
# // or with 
# str_sub(example, posvec[1], posvec[2]) <- "#001628"

Another option is sub to change the substring after the = and one or more space ( \\s* )

sub("=\\s*.*", "= #001628", example)
#[1] "when string says SOMETHING = #001628"