strsplit in R with a metacharacter

Question

I have a large amount of data where the delimiter is a backslash. I'm processing it in R and I'm having a hard time finding how to split the string since the backslash is a metacharacter. For example, a string would look like this:

1128\0019\XA5\E2R\366\00=15

and I want to split it along the \ character, but when I run the strsplit command:

strsplit(tempStr, "\\")
Error in strsplit(tempStr, "\\") : 
  invalid regular expression '\', reason 'Trailing backslash'

When I try to used the "fixed" option, it does not run because it is expecting something after the backslash:

strsplit(tempStr, "\", fixed = TRUE)

Unfortunately, I can't preprocess the data with another program because the data is generated daily.

Answer 1

Your line of code is (though you don't say it explicitly):

strsplit(tempStr, "\\")

and should be

strsplit(tempStr, "\\\\")

This will be read as "\\", which the regular expression will understand as a "\".