[R] Looking for simple line-splitting code

[peter dalgaard]

This also seems to work:

> strsplit(paste(x,collapse="\n"),"\n")[[1]]
[1] "abc" "def" ""    "ghi"


> On 5 Feb 2025, at 14:44 , Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If I have this object:
> 
>  x <- c("abc\ndef", "", "ghi")
> 
> and I write it to a file using `writeLines(x, "test.txt")`, my text editor sees a 5 line file:
> 
>  1: abc
>  2: def
>  3:
>  4: ghi
>  5:
> 
> which is what I'd expect:  the last line in the editor is empty.  If I use `readLines("test.txt")` on that file, I get the vector
> 
>  c("abc", "def", "", "ghi")
> 
> and all of that is fine.
> 
> What I'm looking for is simple code that modifies x to the `readLines()` output, without actually writing and reading it.
> 
> My first attempt doesn't work:
> 
>  unlist(strsplit(x, "\n"))
> 
> because it leaves out the blank line 3.  I can fix that with this ugly code:
> 
>  lines <- strsplit(x, "\n")
>  lines[sapply(lines, length) == 0] <- list("")
>  lines <- unlist(lines)
> 
> Surely there's a simpler way to do this?  I'd like to use just base functions, no other packages.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes using cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd using gmail.com