Split string into substrings on one or more whitespaces

Question

I want to split a string into several substrings at those positions where one or more whitespaces (tab, space,...) occur. In the documentation of strsplit() it says, that split is interpreted as a regular expression.

Thus i tried the following, which did not work:

test = "123 nnn      dddddd"
strsplit(test, "[:space:]+")

it only returned:

[[1]]
[1] "123 nnn      dddddd"

but should return:

[[1]]
[1] "123" "nnn" "dddddd"

Whats wrong in my code?

Answer 1

Try

strsplit(test, '\\s+')
[[1]]
[1] "123"    "nnn"    "dddddd"

\\s will match all the whitespace characters.