[R] wildcard symbol or character

[john.polo]

Michael Dewey wrote:
>> split() where the f variable = 
>> c("1E-*","1W-*","2E-*","2W-*","5E-*","5W-*","7E-*","7W-*","CE-*","CW-*"), 
>> but * doesn't work as a wildcard as i had hoped. can someone tell me 
>> the appropriate wildcard character/symbol to use, please
> Did you really use split()?
yes, i did. the output looked like this:
 > split(rtt,RTT)
$`1E-.`
  [1] CW-W739  CW-W729  CW-W719  CW-W709  CW-W699  CW-W689B CW-W679  
CW-W669
...
$`1W-.`
  [1] CW-W738  CW-W728  CW-W718  CW-W708  CW-W698  CW-W688  CW-W678  CW-W668
...
> I suspect that
> ?strsplit
> might help you and you can follow the link to regular expressions or do
> ?regexp
> for enlightenment on the wonders of regular expressions.
>
> As another poster has mentioned you can of course use substr() in this 
> case but regular expressions enable you to do far more.
i haven't tried any of other solution suggested in other posts yet. 
thanks for your reply.

john