How to use the strsplit function with a period

by

When using a regular expression in the split argument of strsplit(), you’ve got to escape the . with \\., or use a charclass [.]. Otherwise you use . as its special character meaning, “any single character”.

s <- "I.want.to.split"
strsplit(s, "[.]")
# [[1]]
# [1] "I"     "want"  "to"    "split"

But the more efficient method here is to use the fixed argument in strsplit(). Using this argument will bypass the regex engine and search for an exact match of ".".

strsplit(s, ".", fixed = TRUE)
# [[1]]
# [1] "I"     "want"  "to"    "split"

And of course, you can see help(strsplit) for more.

More Related Contents:

  1. Split delimited strings in a column and insert as new rows [duplicate]
  2. Chopping a string into a vector of fixed width character elements
  3. Split a string by any number of spaces
  4. Splitting a string into new rows in R [duplicate]
  5. Find all unique values in column separated by comma
  6. error in strsplit when trying to separate by a comma
  7. Example of using dput()
  8. Order data frame rows according to vector with specific order
  9. Subset rows in a data frame based on a vector of values
  10. Use a value from the previous row in an R data.table calculation
  11. Extract regression coefficient values
  12. How to make execution pause, sleep, wait for X seconds in R?
  13. How to organize large R programs?
  14. What do the %op% operators in mean? For example “%in%”?
  15. How to learn R as a programming language [closed]
  16. What’s the difference between lapply and do.call?
  17. Stepwise regression using p-values to drop variables with nonsignificant p-values
  18. Creating a unique sequence of dates
  19. Convert binary string to binary or decimal value
  20. Determine the number of NA values in a column
  21. Modify x-axis labels in each facet
  22. R: What do you call the :: and ::: operators and how do they differ?
  23. propagating data within a vector
  24. Appending a list to a list of lists in R
  25. How can I extract elements from lists of lists in R?
  26. Sum of rows based on column value
  27. Converting data frame column from character to numeric
  28. simple examples of filter function, recursive option specifically
  29. When and why does “print” need two attempts to print a “data.table”? [duplicate]
  30. ggplot x-axis labels with all x-axis values

Leave a Comment