how to add quotation marks for characters that are inside brackets and separated by a comma?

The idea is to add quotation marks for all strings inside an string list representation.

Tried the next:

input_text <- "[innovation manager, manager director, senior manager]"

scan(text=input_text, what="")

Which returns:

'[innovation" "manager,"    "manager"     "director,"   "senior"      "manager]'

Expected output could look like this:

'["innovation manager", "manager director", "senior manager"]'

What am I missing?

>Solution :

One method – remove the square brackets with gsub, split at the , (strsplit), extract the list element, insert the double quotes (dQuote), and paste the split elements together

sprintf('[%s]', paste(dQuote(strsplit(gsub("[][]", "", input_text), 
        ",\\s*")[[1]], FALSE), collapse=", "))

-output

[1] "[\"innovation manager\", \"manager director\", \"senior manager\"]"