[R] replace text at certain positions in a file

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 5:26 AM, RINNER Heinrich
<HEINRICH.RINNER at tirol.gv.at> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am working with R version 2.10.1 under windows.
> In a text file, I need to replace all characters at certain column positions with blanks.
> For example, say the file contains two lines and looks like this:
>
> ab34cd78e
> fg3 hi78j
>
> I'd like to replace everything at positions 3-4 and 7-8 with blanks, so the output should be:
>
> ab  cd  e
> fg  hi  j
>
> [I'm not sure if this is really an R question(?), solutions outside of R - maybe via shell() or so - are welcome!]
>

Try this:

> s <- c("ab34cd78e", "fg3 hi78j")
> sub("^(..)..(..)..", "\\1  \\2  ", s)
[1] "ab  cd  e" "fg  hi  j"


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