[R] Getting many substrings but only loading the original string one time.

Jonathan
2011-04-11T19:48:13Z

Hi All,
    I'm looking for a way to get many substrings from a longer string and
then stitch them together.  But, since the longer string is really, really
long (like 250 MB long), I don't want to do this in a loop and load and
re-load the longer string many times.  Does anybody have an idea?

Maybe I could pass in two vectors (the first would have the starting
coordinates, and the second would have the stopping coordinates), so it
would be like a vectorized version of substr, where start and stop would be
vector instead of single integers.

Example (I'm reducing the size of the string for the example) of how this
might work:

> longerString <- 'HelloThisIsMyLongerString"
> startVector <-  c(2,6,4)
> stopVector <- c(4,10,5)

> substrings <- vectorized_substr(longerString, startVector, stop Vector)
> longerString
[1] "ell" "ThisI" "lo"

Then I'd like to concatenate them (there will be many of them)

> result <- paste(longerString,collapse='')
> result
[1] "ellThisIlo"

(perhaps the paste command as I've done it is the best way, but depending on
how the substrings are reported there may be different ways). Thanks!

Jonathan

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