How to split and separate time stamp from a string in R

Question

I have a string and need to separate time stamp from that string. I used strsplit function for string splitting. Attaching my code here.

string <- "10:00:in(XXXX),10:47:out(XXXX),12:36:in(XXXX),13:12:out(XXXX)"
splt <- strsplit(string,split = ",")[[1]]
> splt
[1] "10:00:in(XXXX)"  "10:47:out(XXXX)" "12:36:in(XXXX)"  "13:12:out(XXXX)"

Following is my expected output,

[1] "10:00"  "10:47" "12:36"  "13:12"

What modification should I need to add in strsplit function. Can you help me to figure out this problem ?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I'm not sure about what you could add to strsplit but you could wrap it in a substr call and as your times are a standard length this will work.

string <- "10:00:in(XXXX),10:47:out(XXXX),12:36:in(XXXX),13:12:out(XXXX)"
splt <- substr(strsplit(string,split = ",")[[1]], 1, 5)
splt
[1] "10:00" "10:47" "12:36" "13:12"