Question

Used to run R with numbers and matrix, when it comes to play with strings and characters I am lost. I want to analyze some data where the time is read into R as follow:

>my.time.char[1]
[1] "\"2011-10-05 15:55:00\"" 

I want to end up with a string containing only:

"2011-10-05 15:55:00"

Using the function sub() (that i barely understand…), I got the following result:

> sub("(\")","",my.time.char[1])
[1] "2011-10-05 15:55:00\""

This is closer to the format i am looking for, but I still need to get rid of the two last characters (\").

Answer 1

The second line from ?sub explains:

sub and gsub perform replacement of the first and all matches respectively.

which should tell you to use gsub instead.