split character data into numbers and letters

Question

I have a vector of character data. Most of the elements in the vector consist of one or more letters followed by one or more numbers. I wish to split each element in the

Answer 1

Late answer, but another option is to use strsplit with a regex pattern which uses lookarounds to find the boundary between numbers and letters:

var <- "ABC123"
strsplit(var, "(?=[A-Za-z])(?<=[0-9])|(?=[0-9])(?<=[A-Za-z])", perl=TRUE)
[[1]]
[1] "ABC" "123"

The above pattern will match (but not consume) when either the previous character is a letter and the following character is a number, or vice-versa. Note that we use strsplit in Perl mode to access lookarounds.

Demo