[R] splitting a vector of strings

[Michael Dewey]

Dear Eric

I think you are looking for sub or gsub

Without an example set of input and output I am not quite sure but you 
would need to define an expression which matches your separator (;) 
followed by any characters up to the end of line. If you have trouble 
with that then someone here will no doubt write the pattern for you but 
learning about regular expressions is well worthwhile

On 21/07/2016 12:54, Eric Elguero wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I have a vector of character strings.
> Each string has the same pattern and I want
> to split them in pieces and get a vector made
> of the first pieces of each string.
>
> The problem is that strsplit returns a list.
>
> All I found is
>
> uu<- matrix(unlist(strsplit(x,";")),ncol=3,byrow=T)[,1]
>
> where x is the vector ";" is the delimiting character
> and I know that each string will be cut in 3 pieces.
>
> That works for my problem but I would prefer a
> more elegant solution. Besides, it would not
> work if all the string didn't have the same
> number of pieces.
>
> does someone have a better solution?
>
> sorry if that topic was discussed recently.
> There is too much traffic on the r-help list,
> I cannot catch up.
>

-- 
Michael
http://www.dewey.myzen.co.uk/home.html