R convert string to vector tokenize using " "

Question

I have a string :

string1 <- "This is my string" 

I would like to convert it to a vector that looks like this:

vector1 "This" "is" "my" "string" 

How do I do this? I know I could use the tm package to convert to termDocumentMatrix and then convert to a matrix but it would alphabetize the words and I need them to stay in the same order.

Answer 1

You can use strsplit to accomplish this task.

string1 <- "This is my string" strsplit(string1, " ")[[1]] #[1] "This"   "is"     "my"     "string" 

Answer 2

Slightly different from Dason, but this will split for any amount of white space including newlines:

string1 <- "This   is my string" strsplit(string1, "\\s+")[[1]]