Gabor Grothendieck wrote: > Try this: > > >> vec <- c("aaaa", "baaa", "bbaa", "bbba", "baamm", "aa") >> > > >> grep("^(?!(.)\\1{1,}$).*(.)\\2{1,}$", vec, perl = TRUE) >> or even grep("^(?!(.)\\1+$).*(.)\\2+$", vec, perl = TRUE) vQ