How to replace square brackets with curly brackets using R's regex?

Question

Due to conversions between pandoc-citeproc and latex I\'d like to replace this

[@Fotheringham1981]

with this

\\cite{Fotheringham1

Answer 1

You need to use capturing group.

x <- c("[@Fotheringham1981]", "df[1,2]")
gsub("\\[@([^\\]]*)\\]", "\\\\cite{\\1}", x, perl=T)
# [1] "\\cite{Fotheringham1981}" "df[1,2]" 

or

gsub("\\[@(.*?)\\]", "\\\\cite{\\1}", x)
# [1] "\\cite{Fotheringham1981}" "df[1,2]"