[R] unexpected behaviour of sub() / usage of regexp

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 09/12/2011 9:20 AM, Jannis wrote:
> Dear R users,
>
>
> the way I understand the documentation of sub() and regexp the following code:
>
>
>
> sub('[[:digit:]]{1,2}', '', '9ewww')
>
>
>
> ... should yield:
>
> 'ewww'
>
>
> It returns, however:
>
> 'www'
>
>
> Why is this the case? My code should just substitute 1 (minimum) or up to 2 (maximum) digits, i.e. numbers and not the 'e' in the string. Do I misinterpret something here?

I get your expected output of "ewww" running 2.14.0 or 2.14.0-patched on 
Windows.   So it's not a universal problem...

Duncan Murdoch
>
> Thanks for any ideas
> Jannis
>
>
> >  sessionInfo()
> R version 2.14.0 (2011-10-31)
> Platform: i686-pc-linux-gnu (32-bit)
>
> locale:
>   [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
>   [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
>   [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
>   [7] LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C                 
>   [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base   
>
>
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