Convert Character String to Matrix

Question

I have a large (rectangular) vector of strings, e.g:

my.strings <- c("1234567", "1234567", "1234567", "1234567")

which I would like to convert to a matrix:

#      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [,7]
# [1,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
# [2,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
# [3,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
# [4,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7

Is there a simple way to do this in R? (Unfortunately, yes the strings of numbers are indeed character strings and not numeric.)

Answer 1

Another possible solution:

library(tidyverse)

my.strings <- c("1234567", "1234567", "1234567", "1234567")

my.strings %>% 
  sapply(function(x) str_split(x,"") %>% unlist %>% as.numeric) %>% 
  unname %>% t

#>      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [,7]
#> [1,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
#> [2,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
#> [3,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
#> [4,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7

Answer 2

Here's another way:

matrix(as.numeric(unlist(strsplit(my.strings, ""))), nrow = length(my.strings), byrow=T)

     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [,7]
[1,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
[2,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
[3,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
[4,]    1    2    3    4    5    6    7