R: removing numbers at begin and end of a string

Question

I\'ve got the following vector:

words <- c(\"5lang\",\"kasverschil2\",\"b2b\")

I want to remove \"5\" in \"5lang\"

Answer 1

You can use gsub which uses regular expressions:

gsub("^[0-9]|[0-9]$", "", words)
# [1] "lang"        "kasverschil" "b2b"

Explanation:

The pattern ^[0-9] matches any number at the beginning of a string, while the pattern [0-9]$ matches any number at the end of the string. by separating these two patterns by | you want to match either the first or the second pattern. Then, you replace the matched pattern with an empty string.