Replace one element in vector with multiple elements

Question

I have a vector where I want to replace one element with multiple element, I am able to replace with one but not multuiple, can anyone help?

For example I have

data <- c('a', 'x', 'd')
> data
[1] "a" "x" "d"

I want to replace "x" with "b", "c" to get

[1] "a" "b" "c" "d"

However

gsub('x', c('b', 'c'), data)

gives me

[1] "a" "b" "d"
Warning message:
In gsub("x", c("b", "c"), data) :
  argument 'replacement' has length > 1 and only the first element will 
be used

Answer 1

Here's how I would tackle it:

data <- c('a', 'x', 'd')
lst <- as.list(data)
unlist(lapply(lst, function(x) if(x == "x") c("b", "c") else x))
# [1] "a" "b" "c" "d"

We're making use of the fact that list-structures are more flexible than atomic vectors. We can replace a length-1 list-element with a length>1 element and then unlist the result to go back to an atomic vector.

Since you want to replace exact matches of "x" I prefer not to use sub/gsub in this case.