R Split a column containing a vector into multiple columns

Question

Is it possible to split a column containing vectors with 3 elements into 3 seperate columns inside of a dataframe??

One column containing vectors like c("aa","bb","cc") should turn into 3 columns containing singular values like

"aa" "bb" "cc"

Every tidyr or dyplr operation that claims to do this only works on strings and formats the contents of my colum as the String "c("aa","bb","cc")" (?!) before splitting.

Is there any library that can split vectors into seperate columns?

All columns in a data frame are vectors, and `tidyr::spread` works to turn long columns into wide columns for any atomic data type. Are you perhaps referring to a list column wherein each element is a vector? Please add example data to clarify. See: https://stackoverflow.com/q/5963269/8262231 — W. Murphy, Jan 12 '18 at 15:47
I'm not sure I fully understand, but if you have a vector `MyVect <- c("aa","bb","cc")`, you wish to convert into columns then you could use `data.frame(t(MyVect))`. — Dan, Jan 12 '18 at 15:50

tyluRp · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-13T10:51:08.770

Here's one solution using dplyr and tidyr:

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)

df %>% 
  unnest(a) %>% 
  group_by(id) %>% 
  mutate(key = row_number()) %>% 
  spread(key, a)

# A tibble: 2 x 4
# Groups: id [2]
     id `1`   `2`   `3`  
* <dbl> <chr> <chr> <chr>
1  1.00 aa    bb    cc   
2  2.00 aa    bb    cc

Using data, provided by Florian:

df <- data.frame(
  id = c(1,2),
  a = I(list(c("aa", "bb", "cc"), c("aa", "bb", "cc")))
  )

R Split a column containing a vector into multiple columns

1 Answers1

Linked