Is there a better way to parse strings than this?

Thanks for the suggestions, they were all exactly what I was looking for.
(I knew that had to be a more elegant way then my brute force method)

One question though.

I was playing around with strsplit but couldn't get it to work, I realised
my problem was that I was using "." as the string.

I was trying strsplit(string,"\.\.\.") as per the suggestion in Venables
and Ripleys book to "(use '\.' to match '.')", which is in the Regular
expressions section.

I noticed that in the suggestions sent to me people used:
strsplit(test,"\\.\\.\\.")


Could anyone please explain why I should have used "\\.\\.\\." rather than
"\.\.\."?

cat("\\.\\.\\.\n")