pattern matching

Hi,

I have a simple question.  Suppose I have a string "x$Expensive". I want to find the position of the $ in this string; i.e., I want a function that returns 2.  I tried grep, regexpr, etc with no luck, unless I'm just using them incorrectly.  Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Walt

The problem with this specific example is that '$' is a metacharacter in regular expressions, so you have to escape it. For example:

regexpr("\\$", "x$Expensive")

[1] 2
attr(,"match.length")
[1] 1
attr(,"useBytes")
[1] TRUE



See ?regex for more information and if appropriate, consider gregexpr():

gregexpr("\\$", "x$Expensive$MoreText")

[[1]]
[1]  2 12
attr(,"match.length")
[1] 1 1
attr(,"useBytes")
[1] TRUE


Regards,

Marc Schwartz