Split Character String at Whitespace in R

In this article, we are going to discuss how to split character strings at white space in R programming language.

Method 1: Using strsplit() function

strsplit() function is used to split the string based on some condition.

Syntax:

strsplit(input_string, " +")

where 

• input_string is the string
• " +" represents to be split at white space

Example: R program to split a given string

# consider a string with white spaces
string1="Hello Geeks we are in   Java  Python  R and    CPP"

# split the string by using strsplit() function
print(strsplit(string1, " +"))  

Output:

[[1]]

[1] "Hello"  "Geeks"  "we"     "are"    "in"     "Java"   "Python" "R"      

[9] "and"    "CPP" 

It is stored in index 1 in a list so we can modify our code a little by using the index 1 position.

Example: R program to split a given string

# consider a string with white spaces
string1="Hello Geeks we are in   Java  Python  R and    CPP"

# split the string by using strsplit() function
print(strsplit(string1, " +")[[1]])  

Output:

[1] "Hello"  "Geeks"  "we"     "are"    "in"     "Java"   "Python" "R"      

[9] "and"    "CPP"

Method 2: Using scan() function

This function is also used to split the string by scanning the elements.

Syntax:

scan(text = input_string, what = "")

Where,

• the text parameter is used to store input string
• what is a parameter that can take white space which specifies the string to be split at whitespace

It will also display how many times is scanned (It will return the number of split words).

Example: R program to split a string at white space using scan() function

# consider a string with white spaces
string1="Hello Geeks we are in   Java  Python  R and    CPP"

# split the string by using scan() function
print(scan(text = string1, what = ""))  

Output:

Read 10 items

[1] "Hello"  "Geeks"  "we"     "are"    "in"     "Java"   "Python" "R"      

[9] "and"    "CPP"

Example: R program to split a string at white space using scan() function

# consider a string with white spaces
string1="There are big branches in India"

# split the string by using scan() function
print(scan(text = string1, what = ""))  

Output:

Read 6 items

[1] "There"    "are"      "big"      "branches" "in"       "India"