There are two ever-so-slightly different engines of regular expressions implemented in R. The default is called POSIX-consistent; all regex functions in R are also equipped with an option to turn on the latter type: perl = TRUE.
perl = TRUE enables look-ahead and look-behind in regular expressions.
"(?<=A)B" matches an appearance of the letter B only if it's preceded by A, i.e. "ABACADABRA" would be matched, but "abacadabra" and "aBacadabra" would not.