R strsplit with multiple unordered split arguments?

Question

Given a character string

test_1<-\"abc def,ghi klm\"
test_2<-\"abc, def ghi klm\"

I wish to obtain

\"abc\"
\"def\"
\"         


        

Answer 1

In case you don't like regular expressions, you can call strsplit() multiple times:

strsplits <- function(x, splits, ...)
{
    for (split in splits)
    {
        x <- unlist(strsplit(x, split, ...))
    }
    return(x[!x == ""]) # Remove empty values
}

strsplits(test_1, c(" ", ","))
# "abc" "def" "ghi" "klm"
strsplits(test_2, c(" ", ","))
# "abc" "def" "ghi" "klm"

Updated for the added example

strsplits(test_1, c("[[:punct:]]","[[:space:]]"))
# "abc" "def" "ghi" "klm"
strsplits(test_2, c("[[:punct:]]","[[:space:]]"))
# "abc" "def" "ghi" "klm"

But if you are going to use regular expressions, you might as well go with @DWin's approach:

strsplit(test_1, "[[:punct:][:space:]]+")[[1]]
# "abc" "def" "ghi" "klm"
strsplit(test_2, "[[:punct:][:space:]]+")[[1]]
# "abc" "def" "ghi" "klm"