Split strings based on a character in the string

December 11th, 2012

R has various facilities for string manipulation including the strsplit function to divide a string into substrings based on matching to another string.

A simple example is shown below

> strsplit("<td class=\"objectName\"><a href=\"/path/test.html\"
  target=\"\" title=\"An Object\" class=\"myObject\">Stuff</a></td>", "<")
[[1]]
[1] ""
[2] "td class=\"objectName\">"
[3] "a href=\"/path/test.html\" target=\"\" title=\"An Object\"
  class=\"myObject\">Stuff"
[4] "/a>"
[5] "/td>"

This is a basic example and there are many ways the strsplit function could be combined with other string handling operations for processing text streams.

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