Split a string, tokenize substrings, and convert tokens to numeric vectors

Question

I have a character string:

String <- "268.1,271.1,280.9,294.7,285.6,288.6,384.4\n124.8,124.2,116.2,117.7,118.3,122.0,168.3\n18,18,18,18,18,18,18"

I would like to split it into three substrings based on \n.

I did that using the following code:

strsplit(String, "\n")

It resulted in three substrings.

1. How can I get three separate subsisting so that I can use each vector for calculations?

2. How can I tokenize the substrings, to create vectors of numeric values?

Answer 1

Here's an approach with base R. strsplit is a little tricky in that it returns a list and also does not work on a list.

1. As you suggest in your question, use strsplit with split = "\n" to split into a list of 3 strings.

2. Use unlist to change that list into a vector of 3 character strings.

3. Use strsplit again with split = "," to create a list of 3 character vectors

4. Use lapply to convert those character vectors into numeric vectors.

lapply(strsplit(unlist(strsplit(String,"\n")),","),as.numeric)
[[1]]
[1] 268.1 271.1 280.9 294.7 285.6 288.6 384.4

[[2]]
[1] 124.8 124.2 116.2 117.7 118.3 122.0 168.3

[[3]]
[1] 18 18 18 18 18 18 18