[R] split character vector by multiple keywords simultaneously

[Andrew Robinson]

A hack would be to use gsub() to prepend e.g. XXX to the keywords that
you want, perform a strsplit() to break the lines into component
strings, and then substr() to extract the pieces that you want from
those strings.

Cheers

Andrew

On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 04:08:40PM -0700, sunny wrote:
> Hi. I have a character vector that looks like this:
> 
> > temp <- c("Company name: The first company General Manager: John Doe I
> > Managers: John Doe II, John Doe III","Company name: The second company
> > General Manager: Jane Doe I","Company name: The third company Managers:
> > Jane Doe II, Jane Doe III")
> > temp
> [1] "Company name: The first company General Manager: John Doe I Managers:
> John Doe II, John Doe III"
> [2] "Company name: The second company General Manager: Jane Doe I"                                   
> [3] "Company name: The third company Managers: Jane Doe II, Jane Doe III" 
> 
> I know all the keywords, i.e. "Company name:", "General Manager:",
> "Managers:" etc. I'm looking for a way to split this character vector into
> multiple character vectors, with one column for each keyword and the
> corresponding values for each, i.e.
> 
>         Company name          General Manager                  Managers
> 1  The first company            John Doe I                John Doe II, John
> Doe III
> 2 The second company        Jane Doe I                          
> 3  The third company                                          Jane Doe II,
> Jane Doe III
> 
> I have tried a lot to find something suitable but haven't so far. Any help
> will be greatly appreciated. I am running R-2.12.1 on x86_64 linux.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
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-- 
Andrew Robinson  
Program Manager, ACERA 
Department of Mathematics and Statistics            Tel: +61-3-8344-6410
University of Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia               (prefer email)
http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~andrewpr              Fax: +61-3-8344-4599
http://www.acera.unimelb.edu.au/

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