R's char functions

Previously, I posted some functions for manipulating strings in R. I was surprised not to have found these in R. Obviously, I didn't look hard enough. RSiteSearch("strings") led me to a post mentioning the following:

> tolower("hI THerE, guYs!")
[1] "hi there, guys!"
> toupper("hI THerE, guYs!")
[1] "HI THERE, GUYS!"
> casefold("Hi")
[1] "hi"
> casefold("Hi", upper=TRUE)
[1] "HI"
> gsub("-", "", "what-what-what---?", fixed=TRUE)
[1] "whatwhatwhat?"

Well, I knew about gsub before at least.

S-PLUS's gsub doesn't recognize the fixed param but otherwise casefold and gsub work the same. (Of course, this is the point of having casefold in R.)