R: Split the Elements of a Character Vector

strsplit {base} | R Documentation

## Split the Elements of a Character Vector

### Description

Split the elements of a character vector `x` into substrings according to the matches to substring `split` within them.

### Usage

    strsplit(x, split, fixed = FALSE, perl = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

### Arguments

`x` | character vector, each element of which is to be split. Other inputs, including a factor, will give an error.
`split` | character vector (or object which can be coerced to such) containing regular expression(s) (unless `fixed = TRUE`) to use for splitting. If empty matches occur, in particular if `split` has length 0, `x` is split into single characters. If `split` has length greater than 1, it is re-cycled along `x`.
`fixed` | logical. If `TRUE` match `split` exactly, otherwise use regular expressions. Has priority over `perl`.
`perl` | logical. Should perl-compatible regexps be used?
`useBytes` | logical. If `TRUE` the matching is done byte-by-byte rather than character-by-character, and inputs with marked encodings are not converted. This is forced (with a warning) if any input is found which is marked as `"bytes"`.

### Details

Argument `split` will be coerced to character, so you will see uses with `split = NULL` to mean `split = character(0)`, including in the examples below.

Note that splitting into single characters can be done via `split = character(0)` or `split = ""`; the two are equivalent. The definition of ‘character’ here depends on the locale: in a single-byte locale it is a byte, and in a multi-byte locale it is the unit represented by a ‘wide character’ (almost always a Unicode point).

A missing value of `split` does not split the corresponding element(s) of `x` at all.

The algorithm applied to each input string is

        repeat {
            if the string is empty
                break.
            if there is a match
                add the string to the left of the match to the output.
                remove the match and all to the left of it.
            else
                add the string to the output.
                break.
        }

Note that this means that if there is a match at the beginning of a (non-empty) string, the first element of the output is `""`, but if there is a match at the end of the string, the output is the same as with the match removed.

### Value

A list of the same length as `x`, the `i`-th element of which contains the vector of splits of `x[i]`.

If any element of `x` or `split` is declared to be in UTF-8 (see `Encoding`), all non-ASCII character strings in the result will be in UTF-8 and have their encoding declared as UTF-8. As from R 2.10.0, for `perl = TRUE, useBytes = FALSE` all non-ASCII strings in a multibyte locale are translated to UTF-8.

### Note

Prior to R 2.11.0 there was an argument `extended` which could be used to select ‘basic’ regular expressions: this was often used when `fixed = TRUE` would be preferable. In the actual implementation (as distinct from the POSIX standard) the only difference was that ?, +, {, |, (, and ) were not interpreted as metacharacters.

### See Also

`paste` for the reverse, `grep` and `sub` for string search and manipulation; also `nchar`, `substr`.

‘regular expression’ for the details of the pattern specification.

### Examples

    noquote(strsplit("A text I want to display with spaces", NULL)[[1]])

    x <- c(as = "asfef", qu = "qwerty", "yuiop[", "b", "stuff.blah.yech")
    # split x on the letter e
    strsplit(x, "e")

    unlist(strsplit("a.b.c", "."))
    ## [1] "" "" "" "" ""
    ## Note that 'split' is a regexp!
    ## If you really want to split on '.', use
    unlist(strsplit("a.b.c", "\\."))
    ## [1] "a" "b" "c"
    ## or
    unlist(strsplit("a.b.c", ".", fixed = TRUE))

    ## a useful function: rev() for strings
    strReverse <- function(x)
            sapply(lapply(strsplit(x, NULL), rev), paste, collapse="")
    strReverse(c("abc", "Statistics"))

    ## get the first names of the members of R-core
    a <- readLines(file.path(R.home("doc"),"AUTHORS"))[-(1:8)]
    a <- a[(0:2)-length(a)]
    (a <- sub(" .*","", a))
    # and reverse them
    strReverse(a)

    ## Note that final empty strings are not produced:
    strsplit(paste(c("", "a", ""), collapse="#"), split="#")[[1]]
    # [1] ""  "a"
    ## and also an empty string is only produced before a definite match:
    strsplit("", " ")[[1]]    # character(0)
    strsplit(" ", " ")[[1]]   # [1] ""

[Package base version 2.15.1 Index]