[R] split a character variable into several character variable by a character

[Adrian Dusa]

Dear Mao Jianfeng,

"r-help-owner" is not the place for help, but:
r-help at r-project.org
(CC-ed here)
In any case, strsplit() does the job, i.e.:

> unlist(strsplit("BCPy01-01", "-"))
[1] "BCPy01" "01"

You can work with the whole variable, like:
splitpop <- strsplit(df1$popcode, "-")

then access the first part with
> unlist(lapply(splitpop, "[", 1))
 [1] "BCPy01" "BCPy01" "BCPy01" "BCPy01" "BCPy01" "BCPy01" "BCPy01" "BCPy01"
 [9] "BCPy01" "BCPy01"

and the second part with
> unlist(lapply(splitpop, "[", 2))
 [1] "01" "01" "01" "02" "02" "02" "02" "02" "02" "03"

hth,
Adrian

On Friday 10 April 2009, Mao Jianfeng wrote:
> Dear, R-lister,
>
> I have a dataframe like the followed. And, I want to split a character
> variable ("popcode", or "codetot") into several new variables. For example,
> split "BCPy01-01" (popcode[1]) into "BCPy01" and "01". I need to know how
> to do that. I have tried strsplit() and substring() functions. But, I still
> can not perform the spliting.
>
> Any advice? Thanks in advance.
>
> df1:
> popcode     codetot   p3need
> BCPy01-01 BCPy01-01-1 100.0000
> BCPy01-01 BCPy01-01-2 100.0000
> BCPy01-01 BCPy01-01-3 100.0000
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-1  92.5926
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-1 100.0000
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-2  92.5926
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-2 100.0000
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-3  92.5926
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-3 100.0000
> BCPy01-03 BCPy01-03-1 100.0000
>
> Regards,
>
> Mao Jian-feng


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Adrian Dusa
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