How can I (fastest preferable) remove commas from a digit part of a string without affecting the rest of the commas in the string. So in the example below I want to remove the comas from the number portions but the comma after dog should remain (yes I know the comma in 1023455 is wrong but just throwing a corner case out there).
What I have:
x <- "I want to see 102,345,5 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3,242 minutes away"
Desired outcome:
[1] "I want to see 1023455 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3242 minutes away"
Stipulation: must be done in base no add on packages.
Thank you in advance.
EDIT: Thank you Dason, Greg and Dirk. Both your responses worked very well. I was playing with something close to Dason's response but had the comma inside the parenthesis. Now looking at it that doesn't even make sense. I microbenchmarked both responses as I need speed here (text data):
Unit: microseconds
expr min lq median uq max
1 Dason_0to9 14.461 15.395 15.861 16.328 25.191
2 Dason_digit 21.926 23.791 24.258 24.725 65.777
3 Dirk 127.354 128.287 128.754 129.686 154.410
4 Greg_1 18.193 19.126 19.127 19.594 27.990
5 Greg_2 125.021 125.954 126.421 127.353 185.666
+1 to all of you.
You could replace anything with the pattern (comma followed by a number) with the number itself.
x <- "I want to see 102,345,5 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3,242 minutes away"
gsub(",([[:digit:]])", "\\1", x)
#[1] "I want to see 1023455 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3242 minutes away"
#or
gsub(",([0-9])", "\\1", x)
#[1] "I want to see 1023455 dogs, but not too soo; it's 3242 minutes away"
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