flexible string replacement in R

Question

I have the string foo+1234+bar.txt , and I'm trying to substitute foo with baz and remove +bar :

baz+1234.txt

I think I should use gsub

gsub("foo*", "baz", "foo+1234+bar.txt")

but I don't know how to selectively keep some of the characters while removing others at the same time.

Answer 1

You can do this as chained operation. First remove '+bar' then replace 'foo' with 'baz' .

string <- "foo+1234+bar.txt"
sub('foo', 'baz', fixed = TRUE, sub('+bar', '', string, fixed = TRUE))
#[1] "baz+1234.txt"