substring with different formats

["Boylan, Richard" <rboylan@bus.olemiss.edu>]

 

I posted a question regarding extending the function substring.   I will repeat my question

and put the only response that I received.

 

Q:

I was wondering if anyone had extended the * substring * command to allow for something

like this:

 

x <- c("Alabama, Northern", "Alaska", "Georgia, Southern")

unpaste( x, ",")

 

[[1]] "Alabama"  "Alaska"  "Georgia"

[[2]] "Northern" "NA"  "Southern"

 

In other words, extending unpaste to the case in which the separtor does not exist for all

observations.

 

A: (S.D. Byers)

In perl there is a function called qw. It does exactly that. I wrote an
Splus equivalent some time ago:

qw <- function(x) { unlist(string.break.line(translate(x, " ", "\n"))) }

This mandates you  have the translate function but  you could probably
rewrite to  get around that.  Or just use the  string.break.line thing
more directly.

Example:

S+> qw("Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Sauturday Sunday")
        1         2           3          4        5           6        7
 "Monday" "Tuesday" "Wednesday" "Thursday" "Friday" "Sauturday" "Sunday"