R: removing numbers at begin and end of a string

Question

I\'ve got the following vector:

words <- c(\"5lang\",\"kasverschil2\",\"b2b\")

I want to remove \"5\" in \"5lang\"

Answer 1

Get instances where numbers appear at the beginning or end of a word and match everything else. You need to collapse results because of possible multiple matches:

gregexpr(pattern='(^[0-9]+|[0-9]+$)', text = words) -> mm
sapply(regmatches(words, mm, invert=TRUE), paste, collapse="")