strsplit()

strsplit(x, split, fixed = FALSE, perl = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

strsplit() splits a character vector into substrings by finding matches of a delimiter pattern. It returns a list where each element contains the substrings from the corresponding element of the input.

Syntax

strsplit(x, split, fixed = FALSE, perl = FALSE, useBytes = FALSE)

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
x	character	—	A character vector to split
split	character	—	The pattern to split on (regular expression unless fixed = TRUE)
fixed	logical	FALSE	If TRUE, match split literally rather than as a regex
perl	logical	FALSE	If TRUE, use Perl-compatible regular expressions
useBytes	logical	FALSE	If TRUE, match bytes rather than characters

Examples

Basic usage

# Split by space
text <- "hello world"
strsplit(text, " ")
# [[1]]
# [1] "hello" "world"

# Split by comma
colors <- "red,green,blue,orange"
strsplit(colors, ",")
# [[1]]
# [1] "red"   "green" "blue"  "orange"

Splitting into characters

# Split each character
word <- "abcdef"
strsplit(word, "")
# [[1]]
# [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f"

Using fixed = TRUE for literal matching

# Split on a literal period (not regex)
paths <- c("file.txt", "data.csv", "script.R")
strsplit(paths, ".", fixed = TRUE)
# [[1]]
# [1] "file"  "txt"
# [[2]]
# [1] "data"  "csv"
# [[3]]
# [1] "script" "R"

Using regular expressions

# Split on whitespace (one or more spaces)
sentence <- "The   quick brown    fox"
strsplit(sentence, "\\s+")
# [[1]]
# [1] "The" "quick" "brown" "fox"

# Split on digits
text <- "abc123def456"
strsplit(text, "[0-9]+")
# [[1]]
# [1] "abc" "def" ""

Common Patterns

First element only

# Get first split element
parts <- strsplit("first,second,third", ",")[[1]]
parts[1]
# [1] "first"

Combine with sapply

# Split multiple strings and get lengths
words <- c("a b c", "d e f g", "h i")
sapply(strsplit(words, " "), length)
# [1] 3 4 2

Data cleaning with strsplit and paste

# Remove extra whitespace
dirty <- "  hello   world  "
clean <- paste(strsplit(dirty, "\\s+")[[1]], collapse = " ")
clean
# [1] "hello world"

See Also

• base::paste
• stringr::gsub