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rstringsubstrstrsplit

R: how to display the first n characters from a string of words

I have the following string:

 Getty <- "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all  men are created equal."

I want to display the first 10 characters. So I began by splitting the string into individual characters:

 split <- strsplit(Getty, split="")
 split

I get all the individual characters as this point. Then I make a substring of the first 10 characters. 

 first.10 <- substr(split, start=1, stop=10)
 first.10

And here is the output:

 "c(\"F\", \"o\""

I am not understanding why this prints out? I thought it would just print out something like:

 "F" "o" "u" "r" "s"

Is there a way I can alter my code to print what I have above?

Thank you everyone!

Solution

  • The other answers didn't eliminate the spaces as you did in your example, so I'll add this:

    strsplit(substr(gsub("\\s+", "", Getty), 1, 10), '')[[1]]
#[1] "F" "o" "u" "r" "s" "c" "o" "r" "e" "a"