[R] Best way to strsplit a column

Gabor Grothendieck ggrothendieck at gmail.com
Tue Mar 4 15:24:54 CET 2008


Or using the same strg as below:

read.table(textConnection(strg), sep = ":", fill = TRUE, as.is = TRUE,
na.strings = "")


On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 9:06 AM, Dimitris Rizopoulos
<dimitris.rizopoulos at med.kuleuven.be> wrote:
> try the following:
>
> strg <- c("123:abc", "qwe:789f", "abcde", "a:fd", "567")
> sapply(strsplit(strg, ":"), function(x){
>    if (length(x) == 1) x <- c(x, NA)
>    x
> })
>
>
> I hope it helps.
>
> Best,
> Dimitris
>
> ----
> Dimitris Rizopoulos
> Biostatistical Centre
> School of Public Health
> Catholic University of Leuven
>
> Address: Kapucijnenvoer 35, Leuven, Belgium
> Tel: +32/(0)16/336899
> Fax: +32/(0)16/337015
> Web: http://med.kuleuven.be/biostat/
>     http://www.student.kuleuven.be/~m0390867/dimitris.htm
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Daniel Brewer" <daniel.brewer at icr.ac.uk>
> To: <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 2:54 PM
> Subject: [R] Best way to strsplit a column
>
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have a data.frame with a column that I would like to split into
> > based
> > around the delimiter ":".  This is a useful feature in Excel.  I
> > cannot
> > work out the best way to do it in R.  I am sure you need to use
> > strsplit, but that returns a list.  The problem is that some values
> > in
> > the column do not contain a ":" so should have a "NA" in the second
> > column of the result, and this makes doing an unlist a non-starter.
> >
> > Any ideas?
> >
> > Many thanks
> >
> > Daniel Brewer
> >
> > The Institute of Cancer Research: Royal Cancer Hospital, a
> > charitable Company Limited by Guarantee, Registered in England under
> > Company No. 534147 with its Registered Office at 123 Old Brompton
> > Road, London SW7 3RP.
> >
> > This e-mail message is confidential and for use by the...{{dropped:14}}
>
>
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