Question

Is there a way to split camel case strings in R?

I have attempted:

string.to.split = "thisIsSomeCamelCase"
unlist(strsplit(string.to.split, split="[A-Z]") )
# [1] "this" "s"    "ome"  "amel" "ase" 

Answer 1

string.to.split = "thisIsSomeCamelCase"
gsub("([A-Z]){1}", " \\1", string.to.split)
# [1] "this Is Some Camel Case"
# added a counter to prevent situation mentioned in comment
strsplit(gsub("([A-Z]{1})", " \\1", string.to.split), " ")
# [[1]]
# [1] "this"  "Is"    "Some"  "Camel" "Case" 

# another attempt to meet the commenter's concern
# inserts space between lower-single upper sequence
gsub("([[:lower:]])([[:upper:]]){1}", "\\1 \\2", string.to.split)

Looking at Ramnath’s and mine I can say that my initial impression that this was an underspecified question has been supported.

And give Tommy and Ramanth upvotes for pointing out [:upper:]

strsplit(gsub("([[:upper:]])", " \\1", string.to.split), " ")
# [[1]]
# [1] "this"  "Is"    "Some"  "Camel" "Case"