Thanks everyone for your help. All of the solutions posted (Arun, David, Jim and Petr) worked for my problem.
 

From: arun <smartpink111@yahoo.com>
To: Sarah Auburn <sauburn@yahoo.com> 
Cc: R help <r-help@r-project.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, 3 July 2012, 2:13
Subject: Re: [R] R sub query

Hi,

Either of these should work:
m<-matrix(c(".:0:0,0", ".:2:0,2", ".:194:193,1", ".:56:0,56", ".:58:50,8", ".:13:0,13",  ".:114:114,0", ".:75:75,0"), nrow=2)

 gsub("^\\.:[[:digit:]]+:","",m)
     [,1]  [,2]    [,3]   [,4]   
[1,] "0,0" "193,1" "50,8" "114,0"
[2,] "0,2" "0,56"  "0,13" "75,0" 


 gsub("^\\.:\\d+:","",m)
     [,1]  [,2]    [,3]   [,4]   
[1,] "0,0" "193,1" "50,8" "114,0"
[2,] "0,2" "0,56"  "0,13" "75,0" 


A.K.



----- Original Message -----
From: Sarah Auburn <sauburn@yahoo.com>
To: "r-help@r-project.org" <r-help@r-project.org>
Cc: 
Sent: Monday, July 2, 2012 4:15 AM
Subject: [R] R sub query

Hello,
I would like to substitute a substring of characters defined by a specific start and end sequence. 
i.e. in the example matrix below, I would like to substitute ".:X:" with "", where X varies in sequence...
 
m<-matrix(c(".:0:0,0", ".:2:0,2", ".:194:193,1", ".:56:0,56", ".:58:50,8", ".:13:0,13",  ".:114:114,0", ".:75:75,0"), nrow=2)
 
output required:
     [,1]      [,2]          [,3]        [,4]         
[1,] "0,0" "193,1" "50,8" "114,0"
[2,] "0,2" "0,56"   "0,13" "75,0" 
 
Thank you for any help
Sarah
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