Split column at delimiter in data frame
@Taesung Shin is right, but then just some more magic to make it into a data.frame
.
I added a "x|y" line to avoid ambiguities:
df <- data.frame(ID=11:13, FOO=c('a|b','b|c','x|y'))
foo <- data.frame(do.call('rbind', strsplit(as.character(df$FOO),'|',fixed=TRUE)))
Or, if you want to replace the columns in the existing data.frame:
within(df, FOO<-data.frame(do.call('rbind', strsplit(as.character(FOO), '|', fixed=TRUE))))
Which produces:
ID FOO.X1 FOO.X2
1 11 a b
2 12 b c
3 13 x y
The newly popular tidyr
package does this with separate
. It uses regular expressions so you'll have to escape the |
df <- data.frame(ID=11:13, FOO=c('a|b', 'b|c', 'x|y'))
separate(data = df, col = FOO, into = c("left", "right"), sep = "\\|")
# ID left right
# 1 11 a b
# 2 12 b c
# 3 13 x y
though in this case the defaults are smart enough to work (it looks for non-alphanumeric characters to split on).
separate(data = df, col = FOO, into = c("left", "right"))