r - regex for preserving case pattern, capitalization

Question

Is there a regex for preserving case pattern in the vein of U and L?

In the example below, I want to convert "date" to "month" while maintaining the capitalization used in the input

   from        to
  "date" ~~> "month"
  "Date" ~~> "Month"
  "DATE" ~~> "MONTH"

I currently use three nested calls to sub to accomplish this.

input <- c("date", "Date", "DATE")
expected.out <- c("month", "Month", "MONTH")

sub("date", "month", 
  sub("Date", "Month", 
    sub("DATE", "MONTH", input)
  )
)

The goal is to have a single pattern and a single replace such as

gsub("(date)", "\Umonth", input, perl=TRUE) 

which will yield the desired output

Answer 1

This is one of those occasions when I think a for loop is justified:

input <- rep("Here are a date, a Date, and a DATE",2)
pat <- c("date", "Date", "DATE")
ret <- c("month", "Month", "MONTH")

for(i in seq_along(pat)) { input <- gsub(pat[i],ret[i],input) }
input
#[1] "Here are a month, a Month, and a MONTH" 
#[2] "Here are a month, a Month, and a MONTH"

And an alternative courtesy of @flodel implementing the same logic as the loop through Reduce:

Reduce(function(str, args) gsub(args[1], args[2], str), 
       Map(c, pat, ret), init = input)

For some benchmarking of these options, see @TylerRinker's answer.