strsplit                package:base                R Documentation

Split the Elements of a Character Vector

Description:

     Split the elements of a character vector `x' into substrings
     according to the presence of substring `split' within them.

Usage:

     strsplit(x, split, extended = TRUE)

Arguments:

       x: character vector, to be split.

   split: character vector containing a regular expression to use as
          ``split''.  If empty matches occur, in particular if `split'
          has length 0, `x' is split into single characters.  If
          `split' has length greater than 1, it is re-cycled along `x'.

extended: if `TRUE', extended regular expression matching is used, and
          if `FALSE' basic regular expressions are used.

Value:

     A list of length `length(x)' the `i'-th element of which contains
     the vector of splits of `x[i]'.

See Also:

     `paste' for the reverse, `grep' and `sub' for string search and
     manipulation; further `nchar', `substr'.

Examples:

     noquote(strsplit("A text I want to display with spaces", NULL)[[1]])

     x <- c("asfef", "qwerty", "yuiop[", "b", "stuff.blah.yech")
     # split x on the letter e
     strsplit(x,"e")

     unlist(strsplit("a.b.c", "."))
     ## [1] "" "" "" "" ""
     ## Note that `split' is a regexp!
     ## If you really want to split on `.', use
     unlist(strsplit("a.b.c", "\\."))
     ## [1] "a" "b" "c"

