Split text based on dot in R [duplicate]

Question

I have:

"word1.word2"

and I want:

"word1" "word2"

I know I have to use strsplit with perl=TRUE, but I can't find the regular expression for a period (to feed to the split argument).

Answer 1

There are several ways to do this, both with base R and with the common string processing packages (like "stringr" and "stringi").

Here are a few in base R:

str1 <- "word1.word2"

strsplit(str1, ".", fixed = TRUE)  ## Add fixed = TRUE
strsplit(str1, "[.]")              ## Make use of character classes
strsplit(str1, "\\.")              ## Escape special characters 

Answer 2

Try this

library(stringr)
a <- "word1.word2"
str_split(a, "\\.")