Split number by decimal

Question

I'm trying to split a number with a decimal into 2 separate numbers (characters work as well).

a <- c(1241.3233, 5632.2344, 1313,8643)

I would like to return this

col1    col2
1241    3233
5632    2344
1313    8643

I've tried

strsplit(as.character(a), ".")

and

stringr::str_split(a,".")

with no success.

You might want to make your decimal place consistent. Either "." or "," — thelatemail, Apr 28 '17 at 02:03
UpV for d.b.but ericbrownaustin should read ?regex carefully so he understands why "." is going to match any character. There must be 10 or 20 similar questions on SO. — IRTFM, Apr 28 '17 at 02:08
You can use `csplit` from `splitstackshape` , `cSplit(data.frame(a), "a", ".")` — Ronak Shah, Apr 28 '17 at 02:13
Decimal? A decimal is a digit in the range 0-9. Do you mean 'decimal *point*'? — user207421, Apr 28 '17 at 02:41

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 28 '17 at 02:20

4

Two points:

1) Coerce number to string using as.character

2) Escape the period using \\

a = c(1241.3233, 5632.2344, 1313.8643)
do.call(rbind, strsplit(as.character(a),"\\."))
#     [,1]   [,2]  
#[1,] "1241" "3233"
#[2,] "5632" "2344"
#[3,] "1313" "8643"

edited Apr 28 '17 at 02:20

Rich Scriven

97,041
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answered Apr 28 '17 at 02:04

d.b

32,245
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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 28 '17 at 02:09

If you are working on a data frame, and your desired output is going to be a data frame. The separate function from tidyr could be useful. Here is an example.

library(tidyverse)

# Create example data frame
dt <- data.frame(a = c(1241.3233, 5632.2344, 1313.8643))

# Separate the column a into col1 and col2
dt2 <- dt %>%
  separate(a, into = c("col1", "col2"))

Split number by decimal

2 Answers2