[R] UNIX-like "cut" command in R

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, 3 May 2011, Andrew Robinson wrote:

> try substr()

OK.  Apparently, it allows things like this...

> substr("abcdef",2,4)
[1] "bcd"

...which is like this:

echo "abcdef" | cut -c2-4

But that doesn't use a delimiter, it only does character-based cutting, 
and it is very limited.  With "cut -c" I can do stuff this:

echo "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" | cut -c-3,12-15,17-

abclmnoqrstuvwxyz

It extracts characters 1 to 3, 12 to 15 and 17 to the end.

That was a great tip, though, because it led me to strsplit, which can do 
what I want, however somewhat awkwardly:

> y <- "a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z"
> paste(unlist(strsplit(y, delim))[c(1:3,12:15,17:26)], collapse=delim)
[1] "a b c l m n o q r s t u v w x y z"

That gives me what I want, but it is still a little awkward.  I guess I 
don't quite get what I'm doing with lists.  I'm not clear on how this 
would work with a vector of strings.

Mike