Dear R-List, 

I have a dataframe with one column "name.of.report" containing character values, e.g.


>df$name.of.report

"jeff_2001_teamx"
"teamy_jeff_2002"
"robert_2002_teamz"
"mary_2002_teamz"
"2003_mary_teamy"
...
(i.e. the bit of interest is not always at same position)

Now I want to recode the column "name.of.report" into the variables "person", "year","team", like this

>new.df

"person"  "year"  "team"
jeff           2001      x
jeff           2002      y
robert       2002      z
mary        2002      z

I tried with grep()

df$person<-grep("jeff",df$name.of.report)

but of course it didn't exactly result in what I wanted to do. Could not find any solution via RSeek. Excuse me if it is a very silly question, but can anyone help me find a way out of this?

Thanks a lot

Alain




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