Extract a substring from a string, as well as the remainder of the string

Question

I want to store the first character of a string in a variable, and the rest of the string in another variable. For example:

x <- "foo"
prefix <- substr(x, 1, 1)
suffix <- substring(x, 2)

However, it seems a bit wasteful to call substr and substring. Isn't there a way to extract both the substring, and the remainder of the string (the "difference" between the substring and the original string) at once?

Answer 1

Maybe something like this:

substring(x, c(1, 2), c(1, nchar(x)))
# [1] "f"  "oo"

Answer 2

Here is an idea using regex,

strsplit(gsub('^([A-z]{1})([A-z]+)$', '\\1_\\2', x), '_')
#[[1]]
#[1] "f"  "oo"