title: strsplit in R with a metacharacter
body: <p>I have a large amount of data where the delimiter is a backslash. I'm processing it in R  and I'm having a hard time finding how to split the string since the backslash is a metacharacter. For example, a string would look like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>1128\0019\XA5\E2R\366\00=15
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and I want to split it along the <code>\</code> character, but when I run the strsplit command:</p>
  
  <pre><code>strsplit(tempStr, "\\")
  Error in strsplit(tempStr, "\\") : 
    invalid regular expression '\', reason 'Trailing backslash'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I try to used the "fixed" option, it does not run because it is expecting something after the backslash:</p>
  
  <pre><code>strsplit(tempStr, "\", fixed = TRUE)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, I can't preprocess the data with another program because the data is generated daily.</p>