splitting a vector of strings

On Jul 21, 2016, at 7:54 AM, Eric Elguero <Eric.Elguero at ird.fr> wrote:

Hi everybody,

I have a vector of character strings.
Each string has the same pattern and I want
to split them in pieces and get a vector made
of the first pieces of each string.

The problem is that strsplit returns a list.

All I found is

uu<- matrix(unlist(strsplit(x,";")),ncol=3,byrow=T)[,1]

where x is the vector ";" is the delimiting character
and I know that each string will be cut in 3 pieces.

That works for my problem but I would prefer a
more elegant solution. Besides, it would not
work if all the string didn't have the same
number of pieces.

does someone have a better solution?

sorry if that topic was discussed recently.
There is too much traffic on the r-help list,
I cannot catch up.

-- 
Eric Elguero
------------
MIVEGEC. - UMR (CNRS/IRD/UM) 5290
Maladies Infectieuses et Vecteurs, G?n?tique, Evolution et Contr?le
Institut de Recherche pour le D?veloppement (IRD)
911, Avenue Agropolis
BP 64501
34394 Montpellier Cedex 5, France

Hi everybody,

I have a vector of character strings.
Each string has the same pattern and I want
to split them in pieces and get a vector made
of the first pieces of each string.

The problem is that strsplit returns a list.

All I found is

uu<- matrix(unlist(strsplit(x,";")),ncol=3,byrow=T)[,1]

where x is the vector ";" is the delimiting character
and I know that each string will be cut in 3 pieces.

That works for my problem but I would prefer a
more elegant solution. Besides, it would not
work if all the string didn't have the same
number of pieces.

does someone have a better solution?

sorry if that topic was discussed recently.
There is too much traffic on the r-help list,
I cannot catch up.