[R] Perl-style regexes and capturing results

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 4 May 2006, Sean Davis wrote:

> Just a quick question....
>
> In perl, I can capture parts of a regex like /(\w)\/(\d)/ to get back $1 and
> $2 containing the parts of the regex in parentheses.  Is there a parallel in
> R?

Yes.  See ?gsub and especially the examples.  This is not specific to 
Perl, and \1 and \2 are more commonly used, including in R.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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