Removing leading zeros from alphanumeric characters in R

Question

I have a character vector d with alphanumeric characters

d <- c(\"012309 template\", \"separate 00340\", \"00045\", \"890 098\", \"3405 gara         


        

Answer 1

You could use a negative lookbehind to eliminate 0 unless preceded by a digit:

> d <- c("100001", "012309 template", "separate 00340", "00045", "890 098", "3405 garage", "matter00908")
> gsub("(?

Another way using regex:

> gsub("(^|[^0-9])0+", "\\1", d, perl = TRUE)
[1] "100001"         "12309 template" "separate 340"   "45"            
[5] "890 98"         "3405 garage"    "matter908"     
>