[R] splitting a vector of strings

[Eric Elguero]

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
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