Using strsplit ON a list in R

Question

Consider the following exerpt from a list called matches:

[[9997]]
[1] "20070125" "11"      

[[9998]]
[1] "20070129" "01"      

[[9999]]
[1] "20070129" "02"      

[[10000]]
[1] "20070129" "03"      

The class of this list is obviously list. I know that strsplit requires a vector input.

I want to use strsplit to try to get only the date, not the second number.

strsplit(as.character(matches)," ")[10000]

This returns:

[[1]]
[1] "c(\"20070129\"," "\"03\")"

Instead of

[[1]]
[1] "20070129" 
[2] "03"

As I had hoped. I am not sure what the problem is as I tried to coerce the list into a character vector.

Here is code you can use to generate the example above:

matches<-vector("list", 10000)
matches[[10000]] <- paste(c("20070129","03"))

perhaps there are alternatives to strsplit that can be used on a list?