Question

I have a vector of strings:

x<-c("abc.dat", "xyz.dat")

First I would like to replace the period character “.” within each string with another character i.e. “-” minus sign and then append again with “-” minus sign character at the start of each string and finally concatenate all the string within the vector to form a final single string and assigning it to some object like str_final so.

>str_final (enter)
-abc-dat -xyz-dat

Any help will be really appreciated.

Answer 1

Look at ?gsub and ?paste

> paste0("-", gsub("\\.", "-", c("abc.dat", "xyz.dat")))
[1] "-abc-dat" "-xyz-dat"

Notice that I escaped the dot with 2 backslashes. Alternatively, you can use fixed=TRUE like this gsub(".", "-", c("abc.dat", "xyz.dat"), fixed=TRUE)

---

If you want a single string, maybe you want to make use of the collapse argument to paste

> paste(paste0("-", gsub("\\.", "-", c("abc.dat", "xyz.dat"))), collapse=" ")
[1] "-abc-dat -xyz-dat"