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"