[R] splitting a character field in R

[Na Li]

On 28 Oct 2005, ManuelPerera-Chang at fmc-ag.com wrote:

> A<-c(1,2,3)
> B<-c("dgabcrt","fgrtabc","sabcuuu")
> C<-strsplit(B,"abc")
> > C
> [[1]]
> [1] "dg" "rt"
> 
> [[2]]
> [1] "fgrt"
> 
> [[3]]
> [1] "s"   "uuu"
> 
> Which looks promissing, but here C is a list with three elements. But how
> to create the two vectors I need from here, that is
> 
> ("dg","fgrt", "s") and ("rt","","uuu")

To convert a list to a matrix

> do.call ("rbind", C)
     [,1]   [,2]  
[1,] "dg"   "rt"  
[2,] "fgrt" "fgrt"
[3,] "s"    "uuu" 

is good trick.  However, it doesn't work as intended here since the elements
of C have difference lengths.  It would be nice to have 'rbind' and 'cbind'
allow different ways of padding the vectors into the same length.

One work around is:

> sapply (C, function (x) x[1:2])
     [,1] [,2]   [,3] 
[1,] "dg" "fgrt" "s"  
[2,] "rt" NA     "uuu"

You may convert the NA's to "" if you want.

Michael