I have done an embarrassingly bad job using a mixture of gsub and strsplit to solve a problem. Below is sample code showing what I have to start with (the vector xx) and I want to end up with two vectors x and y that contain only the digits found in xx.

Any regex users with advice most welcome

Harold

xx <- c("S24:57",   "S24:86",   "S24:119",  "S24:129",  "S24:138",  "S24:163")
yy <- gsub("S","\\1", xx)
a1 <- gsub(":"," ", yy)
a2 <- sapply(a1, function(x) strsplit(x, ' '))
x <- as.numeric(sapply(a2, function(x) x[1]))
y <- as.numeric(sapply(a2, function(x) x[2]))

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