Thanks to this answer, this regex seems to work. You want to use grepl()
which returns a logical to index into your data object. I won’t claim to fully understand the inner workings of the regex, but regardless:
x <- c("imageUploaded,people.jpg,more,comma,separated,stuff", "imageUploaded", "people.jpg")
grepl("(?=.*imageUploaded)(?=.*people\\.jpg)", x, perl = TRUE)
#-----
[1] TRUE FALSE FALSE