Split a string vector at whitespace

Question

I have the following vector:

tmp3 <- c(\"1500 2\", \"1500 1\", \"1510 2\", \"1510 1\", \"1520 2\", \"1520 1\", \"1530 2\", 
\"1530 1\", \"1540 2\", \"1540         


        

Answer 1

substr(x = tmp3, start = 6, stop = 6)

So long as your strings are always the same length, this should do the trick.

(And, of course, you don't have to specify the argument names - substr(tmp3, 6, 6) works fine, too)

Answer 2

Another option is scan(). To get the second value, we can use a logical subset.

scan(text = tmp3)[c(FALSE, TRUE)]
#  [1] 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1

Answer 3

An easier way to split 1 column into 2 columns via data.table

require(data.table)  
data_ex = data.table( a = paste( sample(1:3, size=10, replace=TRUE),"-separate", sep="" ))  
data_ex[, number:=  unlist( strsplit(x=a, split="-") )[[1]], by=a]  
data_ex[, word:= unlist( strsplit(x=a, split="-") )[[2]], by=a ]