Split or Separate Uneven/Unequal Strings with No Delimiter

Split or separate uneven/unequal strings with no delimiter

This works. It fills with blanks rather than NAs, but you can change that post-hoc if you prefer. (fill = 'right' only works when splitting on a character vector, not explicit positions.)

maxchar = max(nchar(as.character(df$y)))
tidyr::separate(df, y, into = paste0("y", 1:maxchar), sep = 1:(maxchar - 1))

#    x y1 y2 y3 y4 y5 y6
# 1 X1  0  0  L  0         
# 2 X2  0                  
# 3 X3  0  0  0  1  2  L   
# 4 X4  0  1  2  3  L  0   
# 5 X5  0  D  0      

Separate a column with uneven/unequal strings and with no delimiters

The code below may work for you, assuming that the "site", "garden" and "species" columns are of a fixed width.

df <- df %>% 
      mutate(site = substr(id, 1, 2),
             garden = substr(id, 3, 5),
             plot = ifelse(substr(id, 6, 9) == "CAGE", substr(id, 6, 9), substr(id, 6, 6)),
             year = ifelse(substr(id, 6, 9) == "CAGE", substr(id, 10, 13), substr(id, 7, 10)),
             species = ifelse(substr(id, 6, 9) == "CAGE", substr(id, 14, 17), substr(id, 11, 14)),
             sampledate = ifelse(substr(id, 6, 9) == "CAGE", substr(id, 18, nchar(id)), substr(id, 15, nchar(id)))) %>%
             separate(sampledate, into = c("m","d","y"), sep = "/") %>%
             mutate(portion = substr(y, 3, nchar(y)),
                    sampledate = as.Date(paste(m, d, substr(y, 1, 2), sep = "-"), format = "%m-%d-%y"),
                    m = NULL,
                    d = NULL,
                    y = NULL)

R: split uneven length string with missing separator into two cols: separate characters and numbers

You can use extract from tidyr to get data in two columns where 1st column would have everything until a number is encountered and the second column would have the number part.

tidyr::extract(df, names, c('chars', 'nums'), '(.*?)(\\d+)', remove = FALSE)

#      names   chars nums
#1     ALL10     ALL   10
#2      ALL3     ALL    3
#3      CCF8     CCF    8
#4 not_CCF19 not_CCF   19

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You can use the same regex in str_match :

stringr::str_match(df$names, '(.*?)(\\d+)')[, -1]

How to split a data frame column with no defined delimiter

seriesID <- c('ISU00000000033001',
          'ISU00000000033001',
          'ISU00000000063001',
          'ISU00000000063001')

df <- data.frame(pre = substr(seriesID,1,3), 
             supp =substr(seriesID,4,6),
             ind =substr(seriesID,7,12),
             data =substr(seriesID,13,13),
             case =substr(seriesID,14,14),
             area =substr(seriesID,15,17))

df

pre supp    ind data case area
1 ISU  000 000000    3    3  001
2 ISU  000 000000    3    3  001
3 ISU  000 000000    6    3  001
4 ISU  000 000000    6    3  001

Using separate() to split differently-sized strings

You need this:

df %>% separate(x,c("size","anim"), sep = "(?!^)(?=[[:upper:]])")

# A tibble: 4 x 3
  size  anim      y
  <chr> <chr> <dbl>
1 big   Ape       1
2 small Ape       2
3 big   Dog       5
4 small Dog       3

Splitting a string column with unequal size into multiple columns using R

This is a good occasion to make use of extra = merge argument of separate:

library(dplyr)
df %>% 
  separate(str, c('A', 'B', 'C'), sep= ";", extra = 'merge')

  no    A     B     C
1  1 M 12  M 13  <NA>
2  2 M 24  <NA>  <NA>
3  3 <NA>  <NA>  <NA>
4  4 C 12  C 50  C 78

split column containing strings of unequal length into multiple columns in R

Definitely an odd request, but definitely possible with tidyverse.

library(tidyverse)

df <- uniq %>% 
  mutate(n = row_number()) %>%
  separate_rows(seq, sep = ' ') %>% 
  group_by(n, Freq) %>% 
  mutate(n2 = row_number()) %>% 
  spread(n2, seq) %>%
  select(-n)

   Freq `1`   `2`   `3`   `4`   `5`   `6`   `7`  
  <dbl> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
1     3 T     G     T     T     A     T     T    
2     4 G     G     T     G     T     NA    NA   
3    50 G     G     T     T     NA    NA    NA   
4   172 G     NA    NA    NA    NA    NA    NA 

Using separate to split uneven number of variables in a column

With separate from the tidyr package:

library(tidyr)
country_info %>% 
  separate(country_data, 
           into = sprintf('%s.%s', rep(c('country','player.count'),3), rep(1:3, each=2)))

the result:

  country.1 player.count.1 country.2 player.count.2 country.3 player.count.3
1    France              4   Morroco              8     Italy              2
2  Scotland              6    Mexico              2      <NA>           <NA>
3  Scotland              2      <NA>           <NA>      <NA>           <NA>

Separate automatically recognizes : and | as characters on which it has to separate. If you want to separate on a specific character, you need to specify that with the sep argument. In this case you could use sep = '[:|]'. This also prevents misbehavior of the automatic detection when there are missing values (see discussion in the comments).

With sprintf you paste together the two vectors rep(c('country','player.count'),3) and rep(1:3, each=2) into a vector of column names where %s.%s tells sprintf to treat the two vectors are string-vectors and paste them together with a dot as separator. See ?sprintf for more info. The each argument tells rep not to repete the whole vector a number of times, but to repete each element of the vector a number of times.

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