Hi All, 

Is there a means to extract the "10" from "23:10:34" in one pass using 
strsplit (or something else)?
tst <- "23:10:34"

For example my attempt
strsplit(as.character(tst),"^[0-9]*:")
gives
[[1]]
[1] ""   ""   "34"

Obviously it is matching the first two instances of [0-9]. Note that
there may be only one digit before the first ":".

How do I anchor the match to the begginning or better still, just
extract the number I want in one pass?

I can see that I can add "begin" to the beginning of the string, and
match that and do something similar at the end, getting rid of empty
strings
etc - but I think it would take about 3 passess  - and the files are
large. And besides that code would be unlovely.

Kind regards,


Matt Redding
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