[R] Is there a better way to parse strings than this?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Chris Howden
<chris at trickysolutions.com.au> wrote:
> Thanks for the suggestions, they were all exactly what I was looking for.
> (I knew that had to be a more elegant way then my brute force method)
>
> One question though.
>
> I was playing around with strsplit but couldn't get it to work, I realised
> my problem was that I was using "." as the string.
>
> I was trying strsplit(string,"\.\.\.") as per the suggestion in Venables
> and Ripleys book to "(use '\.' to match '.')", which is in the Regular
> expressions section.
>
> I noticed that in the suggestions sent to me people used:
> strsplit(test,"\\.\\.\\.")
>
>
> Could anyone please explain why I should have used "\\.\\.\\." rather than
> "\.\.\."?
>

"\\.\\.\\." is the string \.\.\.   For example, try this

> cat("\\.\\.\\.\n")
\.\.\.



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