How to break a line with dashes outside square brackets

Question

I would like to split the lines as follows:

x <- "abc-1230-xyz-[def-ghu-jkl---]-[adsasa7asda12]-s-[klas-bst-asdas foo]"

by a dash ( -) provided that these strokes should not be contained within the pair []. Expected Result:

c("abc", "1230", "xyz", "[def-ghu-jkl---]", "[adsasa7asda12]", "s",
     "[klas-bst-asdas foo]")

Notes:

• No nesting square brackets inside each other.
• Square brackets can contain any characters / numbers / characters except square brackets.
• The rest of the string is also variable, so we can only assume that we break up -when it's not inside [].

There is a similar question for python ( How to break a string with commas located outside the brackets? ), But I have not yet been able to fine tune this to my script.

Answer 1

, ] [:

-(?![^[]*\])

, R:

strsplit(x, "-(?![^[]*\\])", perl=TRUE)

:

• -:
• (?! ): : , .
  • [^[]: , [
  • *:
  • \]: ]. , , ], [. , , . : a ] , ( , , [), , ). ( ), , \\].

Answer 2

:

library(stringr)
str_extract_all(x, "(\\[[^\\[]*\\]|[^-])+")

Answer 3

r, , . , , :

• - [....] char, \x99
• split by -
• (/), \x99 -

\[[^]]