Use strsplit with multiple delimiters [duplicate]

Question

How can I split this

 Chr3:153922357-153944632(-)
 Chr11:70010183-70015411(-)   

in to

    Chr3  153922357 153944632 - 
    Chr11 70010183  70015411  -   

I tried strsplit(df$V1,"[[:punct:]]")), but the negative sign is not coming in the final result

Answer 1

You can also try str_split from stringr:

library(stringr)
lapply(str_split(df$V1, "(?<!\\()\\-|[:\\)\\(]"), function(x) x[x != ""])

Result:

[[1]]
[1] "Chr3"      "153922357" "153944632" "-"        

[[2]]
[1] "Chr11"    "70010183" "70015411" "-"

Data:

df = read.table(text = " Chr3:153922357-153944632(-)
 Chr11:70010183-70015411(-) ")

Answer 2

How about this in base R using stringsplit and gsub:

# Your sample strings
ss <- c("Chr3:153922357-153944632(-)",
        "Chr11:70010183-70015411(-)")

# Split items as list of vectors 
lst <- lapply(ss, function(x)
    unlist(strsplit(gsub("(.+):(\\d+)-(\\d+)\\((.)\\)", "\\1,\\2,\\3,\\4", x), ",")))


# rbind to dataframe if necessary
do.call(rbind, lst);
#    [,1]    [,2]        [,3]        [,4]
#[1,] "Chr3"  "153922357" "153944632" "-"
#[2,] "Chr11" "70010183"  "70015411"  "-"

This should work for other chromosome names and positive strand features as well.