sapply paste before at beginning of string

Question

So I have a vector

lizt <- c("a","b","c")

> lizt
[1] "a" "b" "c"

and I can use sapply to paste characters after each element

lizt2 <- sapply(lizt,paste0, "$", USE.NAMES=F)

lizt2
[1] "a$" "b$" "c$"

now, how do I use a similar function to paste characters before each element, so I get

lizt3
[1] "^a$" "^b$" "^c$"

Answer 1

paste and paste0 are vectorized, so you don't need sapply

paste0('^', lizt, '$')
## [1] "^a$" "^b$" "^c$"

Answer 2

As mnel showed, you do not need to use sapply here, but if you want to anyway, you can create your own custom function to use with sapply like this:

> sapply(lizt, function(x) paste0("^", x, "$"), USE.NAMES=FALSE)
[1] "^a$" "^b$" "^c$"