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

A slightly more elegant way (without any external packages):

> x = c("aaa", "b11", "b21", "b101", "b111", "ccc1", "ffffd1", "ccc20", "ffffd13")
> gsub('\\D','', x)       # replaces non-digits with blancs
[1] ""    "11"  "21"  "101" "111" "1"   "1"   "20"  "13" 
> gsub('\\d','', x)       # replaces digits with blanks
[1] "aaa" "b"   "b"   "b"   "b"   "ccc" "ffffd" "ccc" "ffffd"