Hi, I'm not sure about the more generalized solution, but how about this for a start.
x <- c("a;b;c", "d;e", "foo;g;h;i") x #[1] "a;b;c" "d;e" "foo;g;h;i" sapply(strsplit(x, ";",fixed = TRUE), '[',1) #[1] "a" "d" "foo" If you want elegance then I suggest you take a look at the stringr package. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stringr/index.html Cheers, Ben > On Jul 21, 2016, at 7:54 AM, Eric Elguero <eric.elgu...@ird.fr> wrote: > > Hi everybody, > > I have a vector of character strings. > Each string has the same pattern and I want > to split them in pieces and get a vector made > of the first pieces of each string. > > The problem is that strsplit returns a list. > > All I found is > > uu<- matrix(unlist(strsplit(x,";")),ncol=3,byrow=T)[,1] > > where x is the vector ";" is the delimiting character > and I know that each string will be cut in 3 pieces. > > That works for my problem but I would prefer a > more elegant solution. Besides, it would not > work if all the string didn't have the same > number of pieces. > > does someone have a better solution? > > sorry if that topic was discussed recently. > There is too much traffic on the r-help list, > I cannot catch up. > > -- > Eric Elguero > ------------ > MIVEGEC. - UMR (CNRS/IRD/UM) 5290 > Maladies Infectieuses et Vecteurs, Génétique, Evolution et Contrôle > Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) > 911, Avenue Agropolis > BP 64501 > 34394 Montpellier Cedex 5, France > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. Ben Tupper Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences 60 Bigelow Drive, P.O. Box 380 East Boothbay, Maine 04544 http://www.bigelow.org Report Gulf of Maine jellyfish sightings to jellyf...@bigelow.org or tweet them to #MaineJellies -- include date, time, and location, as well as any descriptive information such as size or type. Learn more at https://www.bigelow.org/research/srs/nick-record/nick-record-laboratory/mainejellies/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.