[R] Separating a Complicated String Vector

npretnar npretnar at gmail.com
Sun Jan 4 06:20:47 CET 2015


Sorry. Bad example on my part. Try this. V1 is ...

V1
alabama
bates
tuscaloosa
smith
arkansas
fayette
little rock
alaska
juneau
nome

And I want:

V1			V2
alabama	bates
alabama	tuscaloosa
alabama	smith
arkansas	fayette
arkansas	little rock
alaska		juneau
alaskas		nome

This is more representative of the problem, extended to all 50 states.

- Nick


On Jan 3, 2015, at 9:22 PM, Ista Zahn wrote:

> I'm not sure what's so complicated about that (am I missing
> something?). You can search using grep, and replace using gsub, so
> 
> tmpDF <- read.table(text="V1      V2
> A       5
> a1      1
> a2      1
> a3      1
> a4      1
> a5      1
> B       4
> b1      1
> b2      1
> b3      1
> b4      1",
>                    header=TRUE)
> tmpDF <- tmpDF[grepl("[0-9]", tmpDF$V1), ]
> data.frame(tmpDF, V3 = toupper(gsub("[0-9]", "", tmpDF$V1)))
> 
> Seems to do the trick.
> 
> Best,
> Ista
> 
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 9:41 PM, npretnar <npretnar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have a string variable (V1) in a data frame structured as follows:
>> 
>> V1      V2
>> A       5
>> a1      1
>> a2      1
>> a3      1
>> a4      1
>> a5      1
>> B       4
>> b1      1
>> b2      1
>> b3      1
>> b4      1
>> 
>> I want the following:
>> 
>> V1      V2      V3
>> a1      1       A
>> a2      1       A
>> a3      1       A
>> a4      1       A
>> a5      1       A
>> b1      1       B
>> b2      1       B
>> b3      1       B
>> b4      1       B
>> 
>> I am not sure how to go about making this transformation besides writing a long vector that contains each of the categorical string names (these are state names, so it would be a really long vector). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Nicholas Pretnar
>> Mizzou Economics Grad Assistant
>> npretnar at gmail.com
>> 
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