On Tue, May 03, 2011 at 01:39:49AM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > On Tue, 3 May 2011, Christian Schulz wrote: > [...] > > > >x <- "this is a string" > >unlist(strsplit(x," "))[c(1,4)] > > > Thanks. I did figure that one out a couple of messages back, but to get > it do behave like "cut -d' ' -f1,4", I had to add a paste command to > reassemble the parts: > > paste(unlist(strsplit(x," "))[c(1,4)], collapse=" ") > > Then I wasn't sure if I could do this to every element of a vector of > strings without looping -- I have to think not.
Try the following x <- c("this is a string", "this is a numeric") reassemble <- function(x, ind) paste(x[ind], collapse=" ") vapply(strsplit(x," "), reassemble, "character", c(1, 4)) [1] "this string" "this numeric" Hope this helps. Petr Savicky. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.