Split a string by any number of spaces

Solution 1:

Just use strsplit with \\s+ to split on:

x <- "10012      ----      ----      ----      ----       CAB    UNCH       CAB"
x
# [1] "10012      ----      ----      ----      ----       CAB    UNCH       CAB"
strsplit(x, "\\s+")[[1]]
# [1] "10012" "----"  "----"  "----"  "----"  "CAB"   "UNCH"  "CAB"  
length(.Last.value)
# [1] 8

Or, in this case, scan also works:

scan(text = x, what = "")
# Read 8 items
# [1] "10012" "----"  "----"  "----"  "----"  "CAB"   "UNCH"  "CAB"  

Solution 2:

strsplit function itself works, by simply using strsplit(ss, " +"):

ss = "10012      ----      ----      ----      ----       CAB    UNCH                    CAB"

strsplit(ss, " +")
[[1]]
[1] "10012" "----"  "----"  "----"  "----"  "CAB"   "UNCH"  "CAB"  

HTH