converting a string of numbers into numbers in R

Question

I have a similar string to below from my shiny app via textAreaInput: Basically one can copy paste either numbers or names into the box.

It can be either seperated by emty space or line break.

When I read it is similar to the x as an example.

x <- "35   4.6   6.9         -0.4       -4.4"
#I can get each charcter with the following:
b<-stringr::str_split(x, boundary("word"))[[1]] 
#but when the input is all numbers as seen in x, the negative signs disappear as below:

stringr::str_split(a, boundary("word"))[[1]] 
[1] "35"  "4.6" "6.9" "0.4" "4.4"

Is there a way to make sure I get the negative signs as well?

The reason I am using boundary("word") option is because it allows me to paste either with line break or with any number of spaces among elements.

Note: the solution should also work if x has only characters like this:

x <- "name1    name2 name3      name5"
stringr::str_split(x, boundary("word"))[[1]]
[1] "name1" "name2" "name3" "name5"

Answer 1

We can use scan from base R to read those as numeric into a vector

x1 <- scan(text = x, what = numeric(), quiet = TRUE)
x1
#[1] 35.0  4.6  6.9 -0.4 -4.4

str(x1)
#num [1:5] 35 4.6 6.9 -0.4 -4.4