[R] grep and strings

[K Fung]

I have the following command:

length(
  grep("\.a\.", names(temp)))

where temp is a vector with names

I want to count the number of entries that contain the
sequence of characters ".a.".  However, R seems to
return all entries that contain "a" (every entry
contains "." in this example).

How should I fix this?  Thanks
		
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