[R] substr not by position but by symbol

[Ista Zahn]

Hi YN,

I use strsplit for this:

x <- ".7_-.3_-.2_.9"

> strsplit(x, split = "_")
[[1]]
[1] ".7"  "-.3" "-.2" ".9"

> strsplit(x, split = "_")[[1]][3]
[1] "-.2"


Best,
Ista
On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 9:54 AM, YN Kim <y2silence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> One of my variables looks like this:
>
> .7_-.3_-.2_.9
>
> And this is a character variable. I made this by combining four different
> number like .7, -.3, -.2, and .9 using paste function.
> Now, I want to go back to original format from this one combined character
> variable. For instance, I want to extract 3rd number, -.2, from this
> character.
>
> I know I can use substr function, but each position is not fixed because
> sometimes each number has negative sign. Instead, it would be good if there
> is any extracting function which can extract character not by position but
> by specific symbol, in my case symbol '_'. Is there any similar function
> for doing in R?
>
> Thanks!
>
> YN
>
>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.