comma separated string to list in r

Question

I have a comma separated string in R:-

"a,b,c" 

I want to convert it into a list which looks like this:

list("a","b","c") 

How do I do that?

Answer 1

This is a basic strsplit problem:

x <- "a,b,c" as.list(strsplit(x, ",")[[1]]) # [[1]] # [1] "a" #  # [[2]] # [1] "b" #  # [[3]] # [1] "c" 

strsplit creates a list and the [[1]] selects the first list item (we only have one, in this case). The result at this point is just a regular character vector, but you want it in a list, so you can use as.list to get the form you want.

With the same logic you can use el:

as.list(el(strsplit(x, ","))) # [[1]] # [1] "a" #  # [[2]] # [1] "b" #  # [[3]] # [1] "c" 

Or scan:

as.list(scan(text = x, what = "", sep = ",")) # Read 3 items # [[1]] # [1] "a" #  # [[2]] # [1] "b" #  # [[3]] # [1] "c"