[R] Converting strings with internal delimiters into lists

[Thomas Lumley]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, shelby berkowitz wrote:

> Hi UserRs,
>
> I know that there has to be an easy way to do this in
> R (probably easy enough that once someone clues me in
> I'll smack myself on the forehead for not figuring it
> out myself), but my searches on my own have not
> yielded any hints.

I think you are looking for strsplit()

 	-thomas


> I have many fields in my dataset that participants
> entered as "free lists" - i.e., the field constitutes
> a varying number of names each separated by a
> delimiter.  The resulting data frame might look
> something like:
>
> testtable<-
> as.data.frame(cbind(c("Joe,Mary,Jane","Mary"),c("Fred,Joe","Pete,Joe,Mary,Fred")))
>
> In actuality the names are typically multi-word
> organization names, but you get the idea...
>
> What I need to do is to convert these text strings
> into lists comprised of the elements separated by the
> commas so that I can work with these elements across
> the dataset, manipulate them, etc.
>
> Thanks in advance to any kind soul who can offer me a
> tip to the appropriate functions or a line of code!
>
> Best,
>
> Shelby
>
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Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle