find out which country starts with certain character using R

i have a table country called gDat with column country, now i want to find out the country starts with Mal with this code

grep('Mal', levels(gDat$country))

but its returns only the id of that country (not the country name), how to solve this?

>Solution :

Use grepl with the regex pattern ^Mal:

countries <- gDat$country[grepl("^Mal", gDat$country)]