Searching within a ch. string

Thanks for these suggestions. However I have one more question. Is there any
way to extract only numbers? For example I want to extract only "88" in my
example.
  

if you have just one integer number represented in a single string,
here's one way go:

    strings = c('foo 1', '2 bar', 'and 3 as well')
    (numbers = gsub('.*([0-9]+).*', '\\1', strings))

you will need to modify the regex if other sorts of numbers are encoded.
if more than one number is to be extracted from a single string, you can
try the package gsubfn:

    strings = c('foo 1', '2 bar', 'and 3 and 4, too')
    strapply(strings, '[0-9]+')

vQ