[R] character to vector

[Marc Schwartz (via MN)]

On Fri, 2006-07-21 at 15:15 -0500, ajkorman at mail.utexas.edu wrote:
> I have an object of mode character that contains a long sequence of letters. 
> How can I convert this object into a vector with each element of the vector
> containing a single letter?  Essentially, I want to break the long string of
> letters into many individual letters.
> 
> Thanks for the help.
> 
> Alex

> letters
 [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l" "m" "n" "o" "p" "q"
[18] "r" "s" "t" "u" "v" "w" "x" "y" "z"

> MyChar <- paste(letters, collapse = "")

> MyChar
[1] "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"

> MyVec <- unlist(strsplit(MyChar, ""))

> MyVec
 [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l" "m" "n" "o" "p" "q"
[18] "r" "s" "t" "u" "v" "w" "x" "y" "z"

See ?strsplit and ?unlist and of course, ?paste for the reverse
operation as above.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz