r split a column into multiple columns

Asked Jun 16 '17 at 21:12

Active Jun 16 '17 at 21:16

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I'm trying to split a column of strings in a dataframe into multiple columns based a delimiting pattern, i.e., a column of strings "a b" and "c d" should be split into two columns, one with "a" and "c", and another with "b" and "d". The delimiting pattern is in my case any sequence of characters that does not contain a-zA-Z0-9@.

As suggested here I'm trying to use stringr. However, it seems that str_split is sensitive to the number of spaces?

> xxx<-str_split_fixed(c("a b", "c  d")," ",3)
> xxx
      [,1] [,2] [,3]
 [1,] "a"  "b"  ""  
 [2,] "c"  ""   "d" 

> xxx<-str_split_fixed(c("a b", "c  d"),"[:space:] ",3)
> xxx
      [,1] [,2] [,3]
 [1,] ""   "b"  ""  
 [2,] ""   " d" ""  

> xxx<-str_split_fixed(c("a b", "c  d"),"' '+",3)
> xxx
      [,1]   [,2] [,3]
 [1,] "a b"  ""   ""  
 [2,] "c  d" ""   ""

edited Jun 16 '17 at 21:16

asked Jun 16 '17 at 21:12

Alexander Serebrenik

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Try `tidyr::separate` as a nice shortcut. Also please specify the pattern in your question (there are unfinished sentences). If you want example code, you should provide a reproducible example. – Gregor Thomas Jun 16 '17 at 21:14
@Gregor sorry for the unfinished sentences, I've hit enter too rapidly. – Alexander Serebrenik Jun 16 '17 at 21:17
`str_split_fixed(c("a b", "c d"),"\\s+",2)` but I m confused as to why you specify 3 instead of 2 columns – Sotos Jun 16 '17 at 21:19
@Sotos 3 because in the real example there may be 3... Thank you very much! – Alexander Serebrenik Jun 16 '17 at 21:49
ok. So by using the regex `\\s+` for the pattern, you can adjust `n` accordingly and you should be good to go – Sotos Jun 16 '17 at 21:51

r split a column into multiple columns

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