R - Suppressing separator at a single text passage in paste()

Question

When having a paste() with a given delimiter like in the below example, is it possible to suppress the delimiter at single positions?

The example is part of a ggplot()+labs(subtitle=paste(...)) with whitespace separator:

paste("Minimum/maximum number of observations per point:", min(currdataset_S03$nobs), "* /", max(currdataset_S03$nobs), sep = " ")

And results in:

Now, I'd like to suppress/skip only the whitespace between 7 (=currdataset_S03$nobs) and the asterisk (see red arrow in the image). But don't know how.

I'm quite sure that I have seen a quite simple solution some time ago. But I can't remember it, - or my memory may not serves me right.
However, I could not find any helpful post so far. So, has anybody an idea for me please?

Answer 1

You could solve this using sprintf.

sprintf("Minimum/maximum number of observations per point: %s * / %s", 
        min(currdataset_S03$nobs), max(currdataset_S03$nobs))
# [1] "Minimum/maximum number of observations per point: 7 * / 14"

---

Data:

currdataset_S03 <- data.frame(nobs=7:14)