Splitting a character vector.

Hi Rui: I think he's asking about your replacement with blanks.


On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 6:08 PM, Rui Barradas <ruipbarradas at sapo.pt
<mailto:ruipbarradas at sapo.pt>> wrote:

    Hello,

    Sorry, but I don't understand, you're asking about 4 single quotes,
    the double quotes in open.par are just opening and closing the
    pattern, a character string.

    Rui Barradas

    Em 07-07-2012 23:03, John Kane escreveu:

        Thanks Rui
        It works perfectly so far on the test and real data.

        The annoying thing is that I had tried , or thought I'd tried
        the open.par format and keep getting an error.

           It looks like I had failed to add the '''',  in the term.
        What is it doing?



        John Kane
        Kingston ON Canada


            -----Original Message-----
            From: ruipbarradas at sapo.pt <mailto:ruipbarradas at sapo.pt>
            Sent: Sat, 07 Jul 2012 22:55:41 +0100
            To: jrkrideau at inbox.com <mailto:jrkrideau at inbox.com>
            Subject: Re: [R] Splitting a character vector.

            Hello,

            Try the following.

            open.par <- " \\("  # with a blank before '('
            close.par <- "\\)"
            result <- strsplit(sub(close.par, "", dd1), open.par)


            Why the two '\\'? Because '(' is a meta-character so it must
            be escaped.
            But '\' is a meta character so it must also be escaped.

            Then choose the right way to separate the two, maybe
            something like

            ix <- rep(c(TRUE, FALSE), length(result))
            unlist(result)[ix]
            unlist(result)[!ix]


            Hope this helps,

            Rui Barradas

            Em 07-07-2012 22:37, John Kane escreveu:

                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"))

                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)"

                Any pointers would be appreciated
                Thanks
                John Kane
                Kingston ON Canada