Str_Split with double periods

[jillahmad17]

Hi all,
I am trying to separate the first column into three columns: Census tract, county, and estimate ( total, below poverty, and percent below poverty).

How can I split the first column by the ".."? I tried

attempt<- str_split(take1, pattern = '[..]')
attempt
#  [1] "Census"   "Tract"    "201"      ""         "Alamance" "County"  
# [7] ""         "North"    "Carolina" ""         "Total"    ""        
# [13] "Estimate"

As shown above, the output is split by every period, not every double period. Is there a way around this or a better way to split the data? Thank you in advance for any insight!

[williaml]

Try this:

label = "Alamance.County..North.Carolina"
str_split(label, "[\\.]{2}")

[[1]]
[1] "Alamance.County"      "North.Carolina"

The . is a special character and needs to be escaped with \\. The {2} represents a length of two characters in the [].

[jillahmad17]

That fixed it, thank you!