strsplit(split=":") does almost what you want, but it omits the colons from the output. You can use perl zero-length look-ahead and look-behind operators in the split argument to get the colons as well:
> strsplit(c(":sad", "happy:", "happy:sad"), split="(?<=:)|(?=:)", perl=TRUE) [[1]] [1] ":" "sad" [[2]] [1] "happy" ":" [[3]] [1] "happy" ":" "sad" Bill Dunlap TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 9:08 AM, Gang Chen <gangch...@gmail.com> wrote: > I want to do the following: if a string does not contain a colon (:), > no change is needed; if it contains one or more colons, break the > string into multiple strings using the colon as a separator. For > example, "happy:" becomes > > "happy" ":" > > ":sad" turns to > > ":" "sad" > > and "happy:sad" changes to > > "happy" ":" "sad" > > How to do this? > > Thanks, > Gang > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > 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. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.