I'm looking to split a string of a generic form, where the square brackets denote the "sections" of the string. Ex:
x <- "[a] + [bc] + 1"
And return a character vector that looks like:
"[a]" " + " "[bc]" " + 1"
EDIT: Ended up using this:
x <- "[a] + [bc] + 1"
x <- gsub("\\[",",[",x)
x <- gsub("\\]","],",x)
strsplit(x,",")
Answer
I've seen TylerRinker's code and suspect it may be more clear than this but this may serve as way to learn a different set of functions. (I liked his better before I noticed that it split on spaces.) I tried adapting this to work with strsplit but that function always removes the separators.
Maybe this could be adapted to make a newstrsplit that splits at the separators but leaves them in? Probably need to not split at first or last position and distinguish between opening and closing separators.
scan(text= # use scan to separate after insertion of commas
gsub("\\]", "],", # put commas in after "]"'s
gsub(".\\[", ",[", x)) , # add commas before "[" unless at first position
what="", sep=",") # tell scan this character argument and separators are ","
#Read 4 items
#[1] "[a]" " +" "[bc]" " + 1"