[R] recognizing "(" as a character

[Uwe Ligges]

Jean Eid wrote:

> Dear All,
> I have been trying to scan data from pdf files and use R to seperate them.
> The following will make it clear
> I have a line that reads
> "Intrepid (D)  15,977 11,956 45,143 39,014"
> where what is in the parenthesis is either a "D" for domestic or "I" for
> import.
> I want to try to strsplit the line according to the full character "(D)"
> or "(I)"  but unfortunately R recognizes this as "D", or "I" in the
> strsplit command. my question is is there any way that I can tell R that
> this "(" is a character.
> P.S. even grep() does have the same problem. I know this is not a problem
> since "(", ")", "[", etc.. are predefined in R but why is the quotation
> marks for strings not doing its job here?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jean Eid

These functions do use regular expression. Try e.g.:

strsplit("Intrepid (D)  15,977 11,956 45,143 39,014", "\\(D\\)")

Uwe Ligges