[R] substr gives empty output

[David L Carlson]

There is also a way to do this without a loop:

> strsplit(x, "")
[[1]]
[1] "t" "e" "s" "t" "i" "n" "g"
# Or if you just want the vector
> strsplit(x, "")[[1]]
[1] "t" "e" "s" "t" "i" "n" "g"

----------------------------------------
David L Carlson
Department of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-4352


-----Original Message-----
From: R-help [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Howard, Tim G (DEC)
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2018 6:58 AM
To: r-help at r-project.org; Luigi Marongiu <marongiu.luigi at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [R] substr gives empty output

In 

 y <- substr(x, i, 1)

your third integer needs to be the location not the number of digits, so change it to 

 y <- substr(x, i, i)

and you should get what you want. 
Cheers,
Tim

> Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2018 10:50:31 -0500
> From: Ek Esawi <esawiek at gmail.com>
> To: Luigi Marongiu <marongiu.luigi at gmail.com>, r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] substr gives empty output
> Message-ID:
>         <CA+ZkTxubYDSZ3iqsg_=be9HBA2_3-TE95=mXbh4atvG-
> ri_ixQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> 
> The reason you get "" is, as stated on the previous response and on 
> the documentation of substr function, the function "When extracting, 
> if start is larger than the string length then "" is returned.". This 
> is what happens on your function.
> 
> HTH
> 
> EK
> 
> On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 3:59 AM, Luigi Marongiu 
> <marongiu.luigi at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Dear all,
> > I have a string, let's say "testing", and I would like to extract in 
> > sequence each letter (character) from it. But when I use substr() I 
> > only properly get the first character, the rest is empty (""). What 
> > am I getting wrong?
> > For example, I have this code:
> >
> >>>>
> > x <- "testing"
> > k <- nchar(x)
> > for (i in 1:k) {
> >   y <- substr(x, i, 1)
> >   print(y)
> > }
> >
> >         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide
> > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 
> 

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and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.