agrep{base} is very useful, but it would be very useful to also have the offset of the first match returned, e.g. agrepx("foo","sdxforzoo",max.distance=1) => 4 (there is room for quibbling over the definition of first match...). As far as I can tell, the only way to do that now is to do multiple agreps, something like min(agrep("foo",substr(rep("foobar",...))). Is there a version of R agrep that instead just returns the position of first match? The TRE package (http://www.laurikari.net/tre/) implements a much more general version of agrep (including such functionality) -- has anyone integrated it into R? Thanks, -s [[alternative HTML version deleted]]