Question

I am close but can’t seem to get this to work. I’d like to achieve converting this string “1960-12-031 22:00:010” to this string “1960-12-31 22:00:10” by finding the places where two numbers are preceded by a 0 and then stripping the 0.

I’ve got the regex working:

txt <- "1960-12-031 22:00:010"
gsub("(0+[0-9]{2})", "\\1", txt, perl=TRUE)

I just can’t seem to figure out what to do with the “\\1” to strip out the first character.

Any assistance would be appreciated –

Answer 1

txt <- "1960-12-031 22:00:010"
gsub("0+([0-9]{2})", "\\1", txt, perl=TRUE)

Note that this will replace 031, 0031, 00031, etc. with 31. If you want to remove only the first zero, use "0{1}([0-9]{2})".

Update: As per the recommendation in the comment you can use "[\\D]0+([0-9]{2})" to avoid matching zeros within numbers such as 2012.