R help - Nov 2006 - Extract some character from a character vector of length 1

the content of th character vector (of length 1)  is as follows:

a <- "something2 ....pat1 name1 pat2 something2....pat1 name2
pat2....pat1 name3 pat2  "

I would like to extract the character bewteen pat1 and pat2. That's to
say, I would like to get a vecter of c("name1",
"name2","name3").

What I did is use strsplit() twise. But I wonder if there any function
to this specific task?

Thanks.

The following matches pat1 followed by an ungreedy match of
what is in between followed by pat2.  What is in between is
defined to be backreference 1 which is returned.  See:
   http://code.google.com/p/gsubfn/
for more on strapply and the gsubfn package.
> # test data
> a <- "something2 ....pat1 name1 pat2 something2....pat1 name2
pat2....pat1 name3 pat2  "
>
> library(gsubfn)
> strapply(a, "(?U)pat1 (.*) pat2", backref = -1, perl = TRUE)[[1]]
[1] "name1" "name2" "name3"


On 11/28/06, ronggui <ronggui.huang at gmail.com>
wrote:
> the content of th character vector (of length 1)  is as follows:
>
> a <- "something2 ....pat1 name1 pat2 something2....pat1 name2
> pat2....pat1 name3 pat2  "
>
> I would like to extract the character bewteen pat1 and pat2. That's to
> say, I would like to get a vecter of c("name1",
"name2","name3").
>
> What I did is use strsplit() twise. But I wonder if there any function
> to this specific task?
>
> Thanks.
>
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