split string with regex

Question

I'm looking to split a string of a generic form, where the square brackets denote the "sections" of the string. Ex:

x <- "[a] + [bc] + 1"

And return a character vector that looks like:

"[a]"  " + "  "[bc]" " + 1"

EDIT: Ended up using this:

x <- "[a] + [bc] + 1"
x <- gsub("\\[",",[",x)
x <- gsub("\\]","],",x)
strsplit(x,",")

Answer 1

I've seen TylerRinker's code and suspect it may be more clear than this but this may serve as way to learn a different set of functions. (I liked his better before I noticed that it split on spaces.) I tried adapting this to work with strsplit but that function always removes the separators. Maybe this could be adapted to make a newstrsplit that splits at the separators but leaves them in? Probably need to not split at first or last position and distinguish between opening and closing separators.

scan(text=   # use scan to separate after insertion of commas
            gsub("\\]", "],",   # put commas in after "]"'s
            gsub(".\\[", ",[",  x)) ,  # add commas before "[" unless at first position
        what="", sep=",")    # tell scan this character argument and separators are ","
#Read 4 items
#[1] "[a]"  " +"   "[bc]" " + 1"

Answer 2

This is one lazy approach:

FUN <- function(x) {
    all <- unlist(strsplit(x, "\\s+"))
    last <- paste(c(" ", tail(all, 2)), collapse="")
    c(head(all, -2), last)
}

x <- "[a] + [bc] + 1"    
FUN(x)

## > FUN(x)
## [1] "[a]"  "+"    "[bc]" " +1"

Answer 3

You can compute the split points manually and use substring :

split.pos <- gregexpr('\\[.*?]',x)[[1]]
split.length <- attr(split.pos, "match.length")
split.start <- sort(c(split.pos, split.pos+split.length))
split.end <- c(split.start[-1]-1, nchar(x))
substring(x,split.start,split.end)
#  [1] "[a]"  " + "  "[bc]" " + 1"

Answer 4

And here's a version that splits on the brackets AND keeps them in the result, using positive lookahead and lookbehind:

splitme <- function(x) {
  x <- unlist(strsplit(x, "(?=\\[)", perl=TRUE))
  x <- unlist(strsplit(x, "(?<=\\])", perl=TRUE))
  for (i in which(x=="[")) {
    x[i+1] <- paste(x[i], x[i+1], sep="")
  }
  x[-which(x=="[")]
}
splitme(x)
#[1] "[a]"  " + "  "[bc]" " + 1"