Split a string every 5 characters

Question

Suppose I have a long string:

"XOVEWVJIEWNIGOIWENVOIWEWVWEW"

How do I split this to get every 5 characters followed by a space?

"XOVEW VJIEW NIGOI WENVO IWEWV WEW"

Note that the last one is shorter.

I can do a loop where I constantly count and build a new string character by character but surely there must be something better no?

check out this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2247045/chopping-a-string-into-a-vector-of-fixed-width-character-elements — n8sty, Oct 21 '14 at 22:48
Does this answer your question? [Chopping a string into a vector of fixed width character elements](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2247045/chopping-a-string-into-a-vector-of-fixed-width-character-elements) — tjebo, Jan 23 '21 at 16:54

score 58 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 21 '14 at 22:50

58

Using regular expressions:

gsub("(.{5})", "\\1 ", "XOVEWVJIEWNIGOIWENVOIWEWVWEW")
# [1] "XOVEW VJIEW NIGOI WENVO IWEWV WEW"

answered Oct 21 '14 at 22:50

flodel

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@flodel, can you help explain "\\1 "? I've figured everything else out but that stumbles me – user1357015 Oct 22 '14 at 03:38
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@user1357015 I think hwnd does a nice job explaining this idea here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/26495062/1000343 – Tyler Rinker Oct 22 '14 at 03:44
this is awesome, and super fast :) – Brian D Jun 20 '18 at 13:27
What would be the way to reverse this? For example, how would you do this starting from the right, and going to left? Also, instead of splitting by 5, lets say i want the first 8 characters and the last 6 characters separated, so it would look like: ` "XOVEWVJI EWNIGOIWENVOIW EWVWEW" ` – Lasarus9 May 28 '19 at 17:26

score 14 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 21 '14 at 22:49

14

Using sapply

> string <- "XOVEWVJIEWNIGOIWENVOIWEWVWEW"
> sapply(seq(from=1, to=nchar(string), by=5), function(i) substr(string, i, i+4))
[1] "XOVEW" "VJIEW" "NIGOI" "WENVO" "IWEWV" "WEW"

answered Oct 21 '14 at 22:49

Jilber Urbina

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musically_ut · Answer 3 · 2014-10-21T22:52:32.497

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You can try something like the following:

s <- "XOVEWVJIEWNIGOIWENVOIWEWVWEW" # Original string
l <- seq(from=5, to=nchar(s), by=5) # Calculate the location where to chop

# Add sentinels 0 (beginning of string) and nchar(s) (end of string)
# and take substrings. (Thanks to @flodel for the condense expression)
mapply(substr, list(s), c(0, l) + 1, c(l, nchar(s)))

Output:

[1] "XOVEW" "VJIEW" "NIGOI" "WENVO" "IWEWV" "WEW"

Now you can paste the resulting vector (with collapse=' ') to obtain a single string with spaces.

edited Oct 21 '14 at 22:52

answered Oct 21 '14 at 22:46

musically_ut

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should be pasted and collapsed methinks – rawr Oct 21 '14 at 22:48
This looks great, I can paste and collapse from here. But would you mind giving some insight onto how that mapply works? Thanks! – user1357015 Oct 21 '14 at 22:50
@user1357015 Added some comments. – musically_ut Oct 21 '14 at 22:55

bartektartanus · Answer 4 · 2017-09-27T16:27:57.180

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No *apply stringi solution:

x <- "XOVEWVJIEWNIGOIWENVOIWEWVWEW"
stri_sub(x, seq(1, stri_length(x),by=5), length=5)
[1] "XOVEW" "VJIEW" "NIGOI" "WENVO" "IWEWV" "WEW"

This extracts substrings just like in @Jilber answer, but stri_sub function is vectorized se we don't need to use *apply here.

edited Sep 27 '17 at 16:27

answered Feb 04 '15 at 14:24

bartektartanus

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Rich Scriven · Answer 5 · 2014-10-21T23:04:22.850

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You can also use a sub-string without a loop. substring is the vectorized substr

x <- "XOVEWVJIEWNIGOIWENVOIWEWVWEW"
n <- seq(1, nc <- nchar(x), by = 5) 
paste(substring(x, n, c(n[-1]-1, nc)), collapse = " ")
# [1] "XOVEW VJIEW NIGOI WENVO IWEWV WEW"

edited Oct 21 '14 at 23:04

answered Oct 21 '14 at 22:50

Rich Scriven

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Split a string every 5 characters

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