Split a string every 5 characters

Question

Suppose I have a long string:

\"XOVEWVJIEWNIGOIWENVOIWEWVWEW\"

How do I split this to get every 5 characters followed by a space?

Answer 1

You can try something like the following:

s <- "XOVEWVJIEWNIGOIWENVOIWEWVWEW" # Original string
l <- seq(from=5, to=nchar(s), by=5) # Calculate the location where to chop

# Add sentinels 0 (beginning of string) and nchar(s) (end of string)
# and take substrings. (Thanks to @flodel for the condense expression)
mapply(substr, list(s), c(0, l) + 1, c(l, nchar(s))) 

Output:

[1] "XOVEW" "VJIEW" "NIGOI" "WENVO" "IWEWV" "WEW"

Now you can paste the resulting vector (with collapse=' ') to obtain a single string with spaces.