More than 9 backreferences in gsub()

Question

How to use gsub with more than 9 backreferences? I would expect the output in the example below to be \"e, g, i, j, o\".

> test <- \"abcdefghijklmnop\"
&g         


        

Answer 1

Use strsplit instead:

test <- "abcdefghijklmnop"
strsplit(test, "")[[1]][c(5, 7, 9, 10, 15)]