Hi You only have a vector of length 5 and I am not quite sure of the string you are testing so try this
grep('[/]*\\<AARSD1\\>[/]*',test) Duncan Duncan Mackay Department of Agronomy and Soil Science University of New England Armidale NSW 2351 Email: home: mac...@northnet.com.au -----Original Message----- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of C Lin Sent: Friday, 27 June 2014 10:05 To: r-help@r-project.org Subject: [R] regular expression help Dear R users, I need to match a string. It can be followed or preceded by whitespace or // or nothing. How do I code it in R? For example: test <- c('AARSD11','AARSD1-','AARSD1//','AARSD1 //','//AARSD1'); grep('AARSD1(\\s*//*)',test); should return 3,4,5 and 6. Thanks in advance for your help. Lin ______________________________________________ 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.