Hello again -- inevitably, I discovered the (documented) answer 30 seconds after sending my question. Using gsub(...,extended=FALSE) is the way to avoid this issue. Cheers, Kieran -- Kieran Healy, Assistant Professor, Sociology Dept, University of Arizona. kjhealy at u.arizona.edu :: (520) 621-3480 http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Kieran Healy <kjhealy at email.arizona.edu> Subject: gsub() and parenthesis symbols Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2001 15:21:11 -0700 Size: 1968 Url: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/attachments/20010802/16666548/attachment.mht