Hi I am not at all an expert in regular expressions but
gsub("^[[:punct:]]+[[:digit:]]+:", "",m) does the output you want. Maybe by chance :-) Regards Petr > > Hello, > I would like to substitute a substring of characters defined by a specific > start and end sequence. > i.e. in the example matrix below, I would like to substitute ".:X:" with > "", where X varies in sequence... > > m<-matrix(c(".:0:0,0", ".:2:0,2", ".:194:193,1", ".:56:0,56", ".:58:50,8", > ".:13:0,13", ".:114:114,0", ".:75:75,0"), nrow=2) > > output required: > [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] > [1,] "0,0" "193,1" "50,8" "114,0" > [2,] "0,2" "0,56" "0,13" "75,0" > > Thank you for any help > Sarah > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.