A collection of computer systems and programming tips that you may find useful.
 
Brought to you by Craic Computing LLC, a bioinformatics consulting company.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

strsplit in R

The strsplit function in the R statistics package splits a string into a list of substrings based on the separator, just like split in Perl or Ruby. The object returned is a List, one of the core R object types. For example:
> a <- strsplit("x y z", ' ')
> a
[[1]]
[1] "x" "y" "z"
> class(a)
[1] "list"

If you are not that familiar with R, like me, the obvious way to access an element in the list will not work:
> a[1]
[[1]]
[1] "x" "y" "z"
> a[2]
[[1]]
NULL

So what do you do? There seem to be two options:

1: You can 'dereference' the element (for want of a better word) by using the multiple sets of brackets
> a[[1]][1]
[1] "x"
> a[[1]][2]
[1] "y"
... but I'm not going to write code that looks like that !!

2: You can unlist the List to create a Vector and then access elements directly
> b < unlist(a)
[1] FALSE FALSE FALSE
> b <- unlist(a)
> b
[1] "x" "y" "z"
> class(b)
[1] "character"
> b[1]
[1] "x"
> b[2]
[1] "y"
Much nicer !





3 comments:

Unknown said...

I’m not that much of a online reader to be honest but your sites really nice, keep it up! I’ll go ahead and bookmark your website to come back down the road. All the bestBest advertising Agency in the world | top advertising agencies in pakistan | Marketing Agency | pakistani matrimonial

Unknown said...

Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your weblog and wished to say that I’ve really enjoyed browsing your blog posts. In any case I will be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!
Advertising agencies in Pakistan

periyannan said...

The article is very interesting. Thanks for sharing this article. I enjoyed reading your article.

python internship | web development internship |internship for mechanical engineering students |mechanical engineering internships |java training in chennai |internship for 1st year engineering students |online internships for cse students |online internship for engineering students |internship for ece students |data science internships

Archive of Tips