Question

I would like to split a string of character at pattern “|”

but

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

[1] "I"     "am"    "|"     "very"  "smart"

or

gsub(pattern="|", replacement="*", x="I am | very smart")    

[1] "*I* *a*m* *|* *v*e*r*y* *s*m*a*r*t*"

Answer 1

The problem is that by default strsplit interprets " | " as a regular expression, in which | has special meaning (as “or”).

Use fixed argument:

unlist(strsplit("I am | very smart", " | ", fixed=TRUE))
# [1] "I am"       "very smart"

Side effect is faster computation.

stringr alternative:

unlist(stringr::str_split("I am | very smart", fixed(" | ")))