How to replace multiple strings with the same in R

Question

I have a string

vec = c('blue','red','flower','bee')

I want to convert different strings into the same in one line instead of seperately i.e. i could gsub blue and gsub red to make them both spell 'colour'. How can I do this in one line?

output should be: 'colour','colour','flower','bee'

Answer 1

sub("blue|red", "colour", vec)

use "|" (meening or) between the words you want to sub. use sub to change only the first occurence and gsub to change multiple occurences within the same string. See ?gsub

Answer 2

Here you do not need to specify the colors to be replaced, it will replace any color that R knows about (returned by colors())

> col <- paste0(colors(), collapse = "|")
> gsub(col, "colour", vec)
[1] "colour" "colour" "flower"  "bee" 

Also, as suggested in the comments (which will obviously only work if the element is the color only, so the gsub method seems better suited to your purposes):

> vec[vec %in% colors()] <- "coulour"
> vec
[1] "coulour" "coulour" "flower"  "bee"