Split by paragraph in R

Question

I'm trying to split a document by paragraph in R

test.text <- c("First paragraph.  Second sentence of 1st paragraph.

           Second paragraph.")
# When we run the below, we see separation of \n\n between the 2nd and 3rd sentences
test.text

# This outputs the desired 2 blank lines in the console
writeLines("\n\n")

a <- strsplit(test.text, "\\n\\n")

It's not splitting properly.

Answer 1

The output of strsplit is a list . Also, there are spaces after the \\n\\n . So, we need to take care of that as well as convert it to a vector using [[ or by unlist ing

a <- strsplit(test.text, "\n+\\s+")[[1]]
a
#[1] "First paragraph.  Second sentence of 1st paragraph." "Second paragraph."