How to split a string every nth character?

[njtierney]

Hi there!

I want to split a string onto a newline at a specified character. The reason is that I want to present it in a table, but the table cannot handle text wrapping when it is all one big string of text. Below is a demonstration of how strwrap and str_wrap don't really do what I need.

Any help / pointers appreciated!

long_char <- paste(rep(LETTERS, 3), collapse = "")

long_char
#> [1] "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

strwrap(long_char, width = 10, simplify = FALSE)
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
stringr::str_wrap(long_char, width = 10)
#> [1] "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

# What I want - split (Say) every 10 characters
"ABCDEFGHIJ"
#> [1] "ABCDEFGHIJ"
"KLMNOPQRST"
#> [1] "KLMNOPQRST"
"UVWXYZABCD"
#> [1] "UVWXYZABCD"
"EFGHIJKLMN"
#> [1] "EFGHIJKLMN"
"OPQRSTUVWX"
#> [1] "OPQRSTUVWX"
"YZABCDEFGH"
#> [1] "YZABCDEFGH"
"IJKLMNOPQR"
#> [1] "IJKLMNOPQR"
"STUVWXYZ"
#> [1] "STUVWXYZ"

^{Created on 2020-09-09 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

Note: I noticed a similar question for python on SO here, but couldn't find the equivalent in R.

[FJCC]

I manually constructed the limits for the calls to str_sub() but it could be done programmatically.

library(stringr)

long_char <- paste(rep(LETTERS, 3), collapse = "")
StartVec <- 0:7 * 10 + 1
StopVec <- 1:8 * 10
str_sub(string = long_char, start = StartVec, end = StopVec)
#> [1] "ABCDEFGHIJ" "KLMNOPQRST" "UVWXYZABCD" "EFGHIJKLMN" "OPQRSTUVWX"
#> [6] "YZABCDEFGH" "IJKLMNOPQR" "STUVWXYZ"

^{Created on 2020-09-09 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[njtierney]

Oh, nice! Thank you so much! I'll have a go at wrapping this into a function and report back.

Really appreciate you taking the time.

PS.
Go Alto Clef!