splitting a character field in R

Hi Jim,

Thanks for your post, I was aware of strsplit, but really could not find
out how i could use it.

I tried like in your example ...

A<-c(1,2,3)
B<-c("dgabcrt","fgrtabc","sabcuuu")
C<-strsplit(B,"abc")

C

[[1]]
[1] "dg" "rt"

[[2]]
[1] "fgrt"

[[3]]
[1] "s"   "uuu"

Which looks promissing, but here C is a list with three elements. But how
to create the two vectors I need from here, that is

("dg","fgrt", "s") and ("rt","","uuu")

(or how to get access to the substrings "rt" or "uuu").

Greetings

Manuel




                     jim holtman
                     <jholtman at gmail.c        To:       "ManuelPerera-Chang at fmc-ag.com" <ManuelPerera-Chang at fmc-ag.com>
                     om>                      cc:       r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
                                              Subject:  Re: [R] splitting a character field in R
                     28.10.2005 16:00

x <- 'dfabcxy'
strsplit(x, 'abc')

[[1]]
[1] "df" "xy"

On 10/28/05, ManuelPerera-Chang at fmc-ag.com <ManuelPerera-Chang at fmc-ag.com >
wrote:




     Dear R users,

     I have a dataframe with one character field, and I would like to
     create two
     new fields (columns) in my dataset, by spliting the existing
     character
     field into two using an existing substring.

     ... something that in SAS I could solve e.g. combining substr(which I
     am
     aware exist in R) and "index" for determining the position of the
     pattern
     within the string.
     e.g. if my dataframe is ...
     A     B
     1     dgabcrt
     2     fgrtabc
     3     sabcuuu

     Then by splitting by substring "abc" I would get ...

     A     B           B1    B2
     1     dgabcrt     dg    rt
     2     fgrtabc     fgrt
     3     sabcuuu     s     uuu

     Do you know how to do this basic string(dataframe) manipulation in R

     Saludos,

     Manuel