You can use gregexpr
gregexpr(pattern ='2',"the2quickbrownfoxeswere2tired") [[1]] [1] 4 24 attr(,"match.length") [1] 1 1 attr(,"useBytes") [1] TRUE
or perhaps str_locate_all
from package stringr
which is a wrapper for gregexpr
stringi::stri_locate_all
(as of stringr
version 1.0)
library(stringr) str_locate_all(pattern ='2', "the2quickbrownfoxeswere2tired") [[1]] start end [1,] 4 4 [2,] 24 24
note that you could simply use stringi
library(stringi) stri_locate_all(pattern = '2', "the2quickbrownfoxeswere2tired", fixed = TRUE)
Another option in base R
would be something like
lapply(strsplit(x, ''), function(x) which(x == '2'))
should work (given a character vector x
)