R help - Oct 2009 - break up a string into strings with a fixed length

dear all,

I have some very long strings and would like to break up each long string
into multiple strings with a fixed length, e.g. to break up

abcdefghijkl

into

abc, def, ghi, jkl

I tried a couple of commands but was not successful. Any help will be
appreciated.

Best,
Jimmy
-- 
View this message in context:
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try this:
> a <- paste(letters, collapse='')
> # partitions into lengths of 4
> indx <- seq(1, nchar(a), 4)
> a.p <- sapply(indx, function(x) substring(a, x, x+3))
>
> a.p
[1] "abcd" "efgh" "ijkl" "mnop"
"qrst" "uvwx" "yz"
>

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 5:36 AM, J Chen <jiaxuan.chen at mdc-berlin.de>
wrote:
>
> dear all,
>
> I have some very long strings and would like to break up each long string
> into multiple strings with a fixed length, e.g. to break up
>
> abcdefghijkl
>
> into
>
> abc, def, ghi, jkl
>
> I tried a couple of commands but was not successful. Any help will be
> appreciated.
>
> Best,
> Jimmy
> --
> View this message in context:
http://www.nabble.com/break-up-a-string-into-strings-with-a-fixed-length-tp25712955p25712955.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>


-- 
Jim Holtman
Cincinnati, OH
+1 513 646 9390

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?

Try this:
> library(gsubfn)
> s <- "abcdefghijkl"
> strapply(s, "...")[[1]]
[1] "abc" "def" "ghi" "jkl"


On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 5:36 AM, J Chen <jiaxuan.chen at mdc-berlin.de>
wrote:
>
> dear all,
>
> I have some very long strings and would like to break up each long string
> into multiple strings with a fixed length, e.g. to break up
>
> abcdefghijkl
>
> into
>
> abc, def, ghi, jkl
>
> I tried a couple of commands but was not successful. Any help will be
> appreciated.
>
> Best,
> Jimmy
> --
> View this message in context:
http://www.nabble.com/break-up-a-string-into-strings-with-a-fixed-length-tp25712955p25712955.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

This should do what you want:

x<-"abcdefghijkl"
strsplit(x, "(?<=...)", perl=T)

HTH,
STG
--
Stefan Th. Gries
-----------------------------------------------
University of California, Santa Barbara
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries