Replace the Nth occurrence of a string via regex (and in R) or all the occurences after the Nth occurence

Via R using Regex expression (meaning almost any languages) you can replace the Nth occurrence of a character in a string (source). Here a code example that I used in the past:

# remove the third occurence of "_"
> string <- "Hello_world_I am a good_guy and want to_save_the_world"
> string
[1] "Hello_world_I am a good_guy and want to_save_the_world"
> gsub("((?:[^_]+_){2}[^_]+)_", "\\1 ", string)
[1] "Hello_world_I am a good guy and want to_save_the world"

But you can also replace all occurence of a character or a pattern after a specific occurence (source). I was looking for this for a long time, here an example

> string <- gsub("_", " - ", string)
> string
[1] "Hello - world - I am a good - guy and want to - save - the - world"
> gsub("^((?! - ).+?(?= - ) - ){2}(*SKIP)(*F)| - ", " | ", string, perl=T)
[1] "Hello - world - I am a good | guy and want to | save | the | world"

Use regex101.com to play around and understand exactly all parts :)

But here some info:

• ^ start of the line
• (?! - ) different than “ - “
• but .+ meaning anything several times ? except (?= - ) “ - “
• ` - ` match “ - “
• (.........){2} what I explain can be repeated 2 times
• (*SKIP)(*F) stop the match
• |meaning OR (other pattern possible after the FAIL *(F)
• ` - ` match “ - “ that then will be replace

The help I got :

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5925738/which-regular-expression-operator-means-dont-match-this-character
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26574077/replace-all-occurrences-after-nth-occurrence-php
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/7124976/2444948
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55874998/replace-nth-occurrence-of-a-character-in-a-string-with-something-else