[R] wildcard symbol or character

[Michael Dewey]

At 03:07 03/06/2008, john.polo wrote:
>hello all,
>
>i want to split a list into smaller lists. the list looks like this:
>CW-W730  CW-W720  CW-W710  CW-W700  CW-W690  CW-W680  CW-W670 
>CW-W660 
>CE-W997  CE-W987  CE-W977  CE-W967  CE-W956  CE-W944  CE-W934 
>CE-W924 7W-W760  7W-W750  7W-96    7W-941   7W-932   7W-923   7W-914   7W-905
>7E-W565  7E-W555  7E-W545  7E-W535  7E-W525  7E-906   7E-850   7E-840 ...
>
>
>i want the smaller lists to be based on the first two characters, 
>like CW or 7E. i tried split() where the f variable = 
>c("1E-*","1W-*","2E-*","2W-*","5E-*","5W-*","7E-*","7W-*","CE-*","CW-*"), 
>but * doesn't work as a wildcard as i had hoped. can someone tell me 
>the appropriate wildcard character/symbol to use, please?

Did you really use split()?

I suspect that
?strsplit
might help you and you can follow the link to regular expressions or do
?regexp
for enlightenment on the wonders of regular expressions.

As another poster has mentioned you can of course use substr() in 
this case but regular expressions enable you to do far more.

>john
>
>

Michael Dewey
http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk