How to change values before text in string using R - r

Question

I have multiple strings that are similar to the following pattern:
dat<-("00000000AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD0")
I need to change all 0 values to "." before the first character value within a string. My desired output in this example would be:
"........AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD0".
I tried using gsub to accomplish this task:
gsub("\\G([^_\\d]*)\\d", ".\\1", dat, perl=T)
Unfortunately it changed all of the 0s to "." instead of the 0s preceding the first "A".
Can someone please help me with this issue?

Answer 1

If you wish to simply replace each leading 0 with a ., you can use
gsub("\\G0", ".", dat, perl=TRUE)
Here, \G0 matches a 0 char at the start of string, and then every time after a successful match. See this regex demo.
If you need to replace each 0 in a string before the first letter you can use
gsub("\\G[^\\p{L}0]*\\K0", ".", dat, perl=TRUE)
Here, \G matches start of string or end of the preceding successful match, [^\p{L}0]* matches zero or more chars other than a letter and 0, then \K omits the matched text, and then 0 matches the 0 char and it is replaced with a .. See this regex demo.
See the R demo online:
dat <- c("00000000AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD0","102030405000AZD")
gsub("\\G0", ".", dat, perl=TRUE)
## [1] "........AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD0"
## [2] "102030405000AZD"
gsub("\\G[^\\p{L}0]*\\K0", ".", dat, perl=TRUE)
## [1] "........AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD0"
## [2] "1.2.3.4.5...AZD"

Answer 2

This is really hard.
So I tried to do it with a custom function:
library(stringr)
dat<-("00000000AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD0")
Zero_Replacer <- function(x) {
x <- str_split(x, '[A-Za-z]', 2)
x[[1]][1] <- str_replace_all(x[[1]][1], "0", ".")
paste0(x[[1]][1], x[[1]][2])
}
Zero_Replacer(dat)
Output:
[1] "........AAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAA0AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD0"