Replacing captured group with some added letters

Question

I would like to replace the captured group from my regex with XXX(captured group), but it is only replacing it with XXX and deleting the word captured by the regex.

search <- "[a-z]{5,}"
gsub((search), "xxx\\1", texts$text)

If the word: "wonderful" is matched by the regex, I would have wanted to replace it with "XXXwonderful", but I only got "XXX"

Answer 1

You can use

text <- "wonderful"

search <- "\b([a-z]{5,})\b"
gsub(search, "XXX\1", text, perl=TRUE)
# => [1] "XXXwonderful"

Or, if you have fully Unicode words:

search <- "\b(\p{L}{5,})\b"
gsub(search, "XXX\1", text, perl=TRUE)
# => [1] "XXXwonderful"