What you are seeing when printing depends on how you do it (and it can be confusing). Try this, type the following lines exactly (or copy and paste) and carefully study the results. In particular, compare the results of cat(s,'\n') with the results of strsplit(s, '"') .
s <- "{\"Q0\":\"37\",\"Q1\":\"f\"}" s cat(s,'\n') '"' # single quote, double quote, single quote strsplit(s, '"') Hope this is helpful, Dan Daniel Nordlund, PhD Research and Data Analysis Division Services & Enterprise Support Administration Washington State Department of Social and Health Services > -----Original Message----- > From: R-help [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Patzelt, > Edward > Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2017 9:50 AM > To: R-help@r-project.org > Subject: [R] Splitting on metacharacters > > Hi R-help, > > I would like to: > > Extract the "26" and "f" from the following string (i.e. age and gender). > I've tried a bunch of strsplit, grep, etc. Please help! > > *"{\"Q0\":\"37\",\"Q1\":\"f\"}"* > > > Thanks, > > Edward > > -- > Edward H Patzelt | Clinical Science PhD Student > Psychology | Harvard University > *Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory > <http://gershmanlab.webfactional.com/>* > > [[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. ______________________________________________ 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.