Remove first character from a string

Question

Is there a way to remove or replace with "", the "X" from the beginning of words?

Ex:

XN5634_er
X123_er
NX45

Desired output:

N5634_er
123_er
NX45

Totally I have about 14.000 words. I used

gsub("X", '', mylist, fixed = T)     

but X is removed from NX45 too.

Answer 1

Try:

> mylist <- list("XN5634_er", "X123_er", "NX45")
> gsub("^X", '', mylist)
[1] "N5634_er" "123_er"   "NX45"