Replace string containing parantheses-CodePudding

I have a vector that looks like this:

vector <- c("SPN.subset(RELN).geneset1", "Myeloid.svz.geneset1")

I want to replace "SPN.subset(RELN).geneset1" with "SPN.subset(RELN).caudate.geneset1", but it seems the parantheses aren't allowing this to happen:

e.g

> gsub("SPN.subset(RELN).geneset1", "SPN.subset(RELN).caudate.geneset1", vector)
[1] "SPN.subset(RELN).geneset1" "Myeloid.svz.geneset1"

Any ideas how to fix this?

CodePudding user response：

We may match the closing parentheses, followed by the ., andi. nthe replacement, add the ). followed by the caudate substring

sub("\\)\\.", ").caudate.", vector)
[1] "SPN.subset(RELN).caudate.geneset1" "Myeloid.svz.geneset1"

with gsub/sub, the default option is fixed = FALSE i.e. in regex mode. When it is in regex mode, the () is treated differently i.e. it is a metacharacter to capture group instead of literally evaluating

CodePudding user response：

We could escape the special characters with \\ in the pattern of gsub: Notice akrun is providing a more general approach!

gsub("SPN.subset\\(RELN\\).geneset1", "SPN.subset(RELN).caudate.geneset1", vector)

[1] "SPN.subset(RELN).caudate.geneset1" "Myeloid.svz.geneset1"