Ideally, in base R I need some kind of string manipulation that will let me detect a pattern and change the string 3 positions after the pattern.
example <- "when string says SOMETHING = #c792ea"
desired output:
when string says SOMETHING = #001628
I have tried gsub but I am not sure how I can get it to replace the characters after a pattern.
If it based on the position of character, then we can use substring assignment
substring(example, 30) <- "#001628"
example
#[1] "when string says SOMETHING = #001628"
Or if we need to find the position of the word that starts with #
library(stringr)
posvec <- c(str_locate(example, "#\\w+"))
substring(example, posvec[1], posvec[2]) <- "#001628"
# // or with
# str_sub(example, posvec[1], posvec[2]) <- "#001628"
Another option is sub to change the substring after the = and one or more space (\\s*)
sub("=\\s*.*", "= #001628", example)
#[1] "when string says SOMETHING = #001628"