Partial string matching using patterns

Question

I need to write a query in R to match partial string in column names. I am looking for something similar to LIKE operator in SQL. For e.g, if I know beginning, middle or end

Answer 1

In regular expressions, ^ specifies the beginning of the string, $ specifies the end, thus:

y<- c("I am looking for a dog", "looking for a new dog", "a dog", "I am just looking")
grep("^looking.*dog$", y)
[1] 2