Split a string vector at whitespace

Question

I have the following vector:

tmp3 <- c("1500 2", "1500 1", "1510 2", "1510 1", "1520 2", "1520 1", "1530 2", 
"1530 1", "1540 2", "1540 1")

I would like to just retain the second number in each of the atoms of this vector, so it would read:

c(2,1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2,1)

Answer 1

There's probably a better way, but here are two approaches with strsplit():

as.numeric(data.frame(strsplit(tmp3, " "))[2,])
as.numeric(lapply(strsplit(tmp3," "), function(x) x[2]))

The as.numeric() may not be necessary if you can use characters...

Answer 2

One could use read.table on textConnection:

X <- read.table(textConnection(tmp3))

then

> str(X)
'data.frame':   10 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ V1: int  1500 1500 1510 1510 1520 1520 1530 1530 1540 1540
 $ V2: int  2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1

so X$V2 is what you need.

Answer 3

It depends a little bit on how closely your actual data matches the example data you've given. I you're just trying to get everything after the space, you can use gsub:

gsub(".+\\s+", "", tmp3)
[1] "2" "1" "2" "1" "2" "1" "2" "1" "2" "1"

If you're trying to implement a rule more complicated than "take everything after the space", you'll need a more complicated regular expresion.