Insert "and" before last element in string

Question

Say I have this string:

fruits <- c("apple", "pear", "orange", "banana", "melon")

I can collapse each element into a string like this:

cat(paste(fruits, collapse = ", "))

But how can I insert and before the last element? Note that my real strings vary in length.

Output should be:

apple, pear, orange, banana and melon

Answer 1

You may use sub

> cat(sub("(.*),", "\\1 and",paste(fruits, collapse = ", ")))
apple, pear, orange, banana and melon