Splitting a character vector.

-----Original Message-----
From: dwinsemius at comcast.net
Sent: Sat, 7 Jul 2012 21:45:58 -0400
To: jrkrideau at inbox.com
Subject: Re: [R] Splitting a character vector.


On Jul 7, 2012, at 5:37 PM, John Kane wrote:

I am lousy at simple regex and I have not found a solution to a
simple problem.

I have a vector with some character values that I want to split.
Sample data
dd1  <-  c( "XXY (mat harry)","XXY (jim bob)", "CAMP (joe blow)",
"ALP (max jack)")

Desired result
dd2  <-  data.frame( xx = c("XXY", "XXY", "CAMP", "ALP"), yy =
c("mat harry", "jim bob" , "joe blow", "max jack"))

data.frame(xx=sub("(\\s\\(.+$)", "", dd1),
            yy=sub("(.+)(\\s\\()(.+)(\\)$)", "\\3", dd1) )
     xx        yy
1  XXY mat harry
2  XXY   jim bob
3 CAMP  joe blow
4  ALP  max jack

I thought I should be able to split the characters with strsplit but
either I am misunderstanding the function or don't know how to
escape a "(" properly in an effort to at least get   "XXY" "(mat
harry)"

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT