R help - Jul 2008 - Converting to subscripts and superscripts

Hi,

I am reading in a CSV file of chemical reactions where the subscripts and
superscripts are encoded in angle brackets, like below:

2 H<SUP>+</SUP> + 2
O<SUB>2</SUB><SUP>-</SUP>

Is there a way to convert these to actual sub/superscripts and save them in
another excel file? I greatly appreciate the help!

Thanks,
-Nina

PS. I asked this before, but I don't think I was very clear about my
problem. I
got suggestions about plotmath(), but I wasn't sure if this can also be used
when writing tabular files. Is plotmath() just for formatting text for
graphics?

<naw3 <at> duke.edu> writes:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am reading in a CSV file of chemical reactions where the subscripts and
> superscripts are encoded in angle brackets, like below:
> 
> 2 H<SUP>+</SUP> + 2
O<SUB>2</SUB><SUP>-</SUP>
> 
> Is there a way to convert these to actual sub/superscripts and save them in
> another excel file? I greatly appreciate the help!
> 
> Thanks,
> -Nina
> 
  I don't think this is possible (or at least not easy).
What you're really asking for is an Excel filter; seems
to me the easiest (?) way to do this would be in Visual
Basic, or to do search and replace in your work sheet,
replacing <sup>2</sup> with (superscript)2, and so on
[it doesn't look like Excel's search-and-replace has
a regular expression facility, but if you only have
a few worksheets and a limited number of sub- and
superscripts (say sub/super 1,2,3,+,-) this shouldn't
be too painful ...

  Ben Bolker