Having issues with REGEX in R using logical AND

Question

For some reason, I can't get the logical AND operator to work in R REGEX.

Sample vector:

regv <- c('33x119','[33x119z','!-?2312zzy?')

I am trying to replace all punctuation at the first character position with a blank except for a left bracket "[" and an exclamation point "!".

r3 <- gsub('^[[[:punct:]]&&[^[\\]!]]{1}','', regv)

The result is the same the original vector. Any ideas? Should I use negative lookaheads?

Answer 1

I'd probably do it via negation--replace any starting character that's not letter, number, whitespace, [, or !:

sub("^[^a-zA-Z0-9\\s\\[!]", '', regv)
# [1] "33x119"      "[33x119z"    "!-?2312zzy?"