[R] Looking for simple line-splitting code

[Duncan Murdoch]

Thanks to Rui, Peter and Tanvir!  Peter's seems to be the fastest of the 
3 suggestions so far on the little test case, but on the real data 
(where x contains several thousand lines), Rui's seems best.

Duncan

On 2025-02-05 9:13 a.m., peter dalgaard wrote:
> 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
>>
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>