R: automatically adding quotes infront and behind text

I am working with the R programming language. I have a data frame called "a" with a single column called "V1". Each entry in "a" is a URL link in the following format:

 1 https:blah-blah-blah.com/item/123/index.do   2 https:blah-blah-blah.com/item/124/index.do   3 https:blah-blah-blah.com/item/125/index.do  

I am trying to add double quotes (i.e " ") in front of and behind each of these items, so they look like this:

 1 "https:blah-blah-blah.com/item/123/index.do"   2" https:blah-blah-blah.com/item/124/index.do"   3 "https:blah-blah-blah.com/item/125/index.do"  

Using this previous stackoverflow post (How to add quotes around each word in a string in R? ) , I tried the following code:

new_file = cat(gsub("\\b", '"',a$V1, perl=T))  

and

new_file = cat(gsub("(\\w+)", '"\\1"', a$V1))  

But these are not producing the intended results. Can someone please show me what I am doing wrong?

Thanks

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67041074/r-automatically-adding-quotes-infront-and-behind-text April 11, 2021 at 11:02AM