Split a string with a gap of two characters

Question

I've wrote code that does this:

text <- "abcdef"

substring(text, first = (1:(nchar(text)/2)) * 2 - 1, last = (1:(nchar(text)/2)) * 2)

Result:

"ab" "cd" "ef"

It works perfecty for small sized Strings but not for long ones.

Any suggestion, how I can do it faster?

What do you mean with "but not for long". Please give an example! — jogo, Feb 20 '18 at 10:28
@jogo I've got a file with a huge length String. Just imagine a whole book for example — Yuva, Feb 20 '18 at 10:30
For efficiency, see "g2" solution by @GSee [here](https://stackoverflow.com/a/11619681/680068). — zx8754, Feb 20 '18 at 10:36
@zx8754 fastest way is: `sst <- strsplit(x, "")[[1]] out <- paste0(sst[c(TRUE, FALSE)], sst[c(FALSE, TRUE)])` — Yuva, Feb 20 '18 at 10:50
@jogo it is duplicate of another [topic](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11619616/how-to-split-a-string-into-substrings-of-a-given-length/11619681#11619681) — Yuva, Feb 20 '18 at 10:53
Glad it was helpful, I now updated the duplicate links to your post. — zx8754, Feb 20 '18 at 10:58
@Yuva I not voted "dup". I voted "why this code is not working ..." — jogo, Feb 20 '18 at 11:01
@zx8754 it's a shame that i can't mark your comment as the accepted answer — Yuva, Feb 20 '18 at 11:07
No need, anyone having the same question, can easily navigate to linked posts and get the answer. Or @ANG could add that solution to their post, then you could accept as an answer. — zx8754, Feb 20 '18 at 11:12

nghauran · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-20T10:36:08.280

2

Try trimws(gsub("(.{2})", "\\1 ", text)) and stringi::stri_sub(text, seq(1, stringi::stri_length(text), by = 2), length = 2)

edited Feb 20 '18 at 10:36

answered Feb 20 '18 at 10:30

nghauran

1

Would you please add your answer [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11619616/how-to-split-a-string-into-substrings-of-a-given-length/11619681#11619681) so I can declare your answer as the accepted one? Otherwise, if people get here and see that it's a duplicate, they may not have a look at what you said as it's in the bottom of the windows – Yuva Feb 20 '18 at 11:24

1 Answers1