Question

How can I (fastest preferable) remove commas from a digit part of a string without affecting the rest of the commas in the string. So in the example below I want to remove the comas from the number portions but the comma after dog should remain (yes I know the comma in 1023455 is wrong but just throwing a corner case out there).

What I have:

x <- "I want to see 102,345,5 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3,242 minutes away"

Desired outcome:

[1] "I want to see 1023455 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3242 minutes away"

Stipulation: must be done in base no add on packages.

Thank you in advance.

EDIT:
Thank you Dason, Greg and Dirk. Both your responses worked very well. I was playing with something close to Dason’s response but had the comma inside the parenthesis. Now looking at it that doesn’t even make sense. I microbenchmarked both responses as I need speed here (text data):

Unit: microseconds
         expr     min      lq  median      uq     max
1  Dason_0to9  14.461  15.395  15.861  16.328  25.191
2 Dason_digit  21.926  23.791  24.258  24.725  65.777
3        Dirk 127.354 128.287 128.754 129.686 154.410
4      Greg_1  18.193  19.126  19.127  19.594  27.990
5      Greg_2 125.021 125.954 126.421 127.353 185.666

+1 to all of you.

Answer 1

You could replace anything with the pattern (comma followed by a number) with the number itself.

x <- "I want to see 102,345,5 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3,242 minutes away"
gsub(",([[:digit:]])", "\\1", x)
#[1] "I want to see 1023455 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3242 minutes away"
#or
gsub(",([0-9])", "\\1", x)
#[1] "I want to see 1023455 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3242 minutes away"