How should I split and retain elements using strsplit?
r, strsplit
Solution
Fundamentally, it seems to me that what you want is not to split on `[0-9]+` but to split on the transition between `[0-9]+` and everything else. In your string, that transition is not pre-existing. To insert it, you could pre-process with `gsub` and back-referencing:
test <- "abc123def"
strsplit( gsub("([0-9]+)","~\\1~",test), "~" )
[[1]]
[1] "abc" "123" "def"
Problem
What a strsplit function in R does is, match and delete a given regular expression to split the rest of the string into vectors. ``` >strsplit("abc123def", "[0-9]+") [[1]] [1] "abc" "" "" "def" ``` But how should I split the string the same way using regular expression, but also retain the matches? I need something like the following. ``` >FUNCTION("abc123def", "[0-9]+") [[1]] [1] "abc" "123" "def" ``` Using strapply("abc123def", "[0-9]+|[a-z]+") works here, but what if the rest of the string other than the matches cannot be captured by a regular expression?