How to strsplit using '|' character, it behaves unexpectedly?

Question

I would like to split a string of character at pattern \"|\"

but

unlist(strsplit(\"I am | very smart\", \" | \"))

[1] \"I\"     \"am\"    \"|\"              


        

Answer 1

If you are parsing a table than calling read.table might be a better option. Tiny example:

> txt <- textConnection("I am | very smart")
> read.table(txt, sep='|')
     V1          V2
1 I am   very smart

So I would suggest to fetch the wiki page with Rcurl, grab the interesting part of the page with XML (which has a really neat function to parse HTML tables also) and if HTML format is not available call read.table with specified sep. Good luck!