How to extract words between two periods using gsub

Question

I have a text that looks like this:

txt <- "w.raw.median"

I want to extract the second word in between two periods ( . ), giving this output

> raw

But why this doesn't work

gsub(".*\\.", "", txt)

What's the right way to do it?

Answer 1

Try this:

gsub(".*\\.(.*)\\..*", "\\1", txt)
[1] "raw"

Answer 2

Also consider

strsplit(txt,'.',fixed=TRUE)[[1]][2]

for a (slightly) more readable version