Remove last occurrence of character

Question

A question came across talkstats.com today in which the poster wanted to remove the last period of a string using regex (not strsplit). I made an attempt to do thi

Answer 1

I'm pretty lazy with my regex, but this works:

gsub("(*)(.)([0-9]+$)","\\1\\3",N)

I tend to take the opposite approach from the standard. Instead of replacing the '.' with a zero-length string, I just parse the two pieces that are on either side.