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rdata-cleaning

How to spread a tibble conbined with strsplit?

I need to spread a tibble where one column has many elements to split, and they're not the same length. I put the orginal sample and predicted outcome below. Thanks.

a;b;c | 2016
d;e  | 2019

converts it into:

a | 2016
b | 2016
c | 2016
d | 2019
e | 2019
Solution

  • Maybe using strsplit and use Map with data.frame and rbind the result:

    do.call(rbind, Map(data.frame, a=strsplit(x$a, ";", TRUE), b=x$b))
#  a    b
#1 a 2016
#2 b 2016
#3 c 2016
#4 d 2019
#5 e 2019

    or

    y <- strsplit(x$a, ";", TRUE)
data.frame(a = unlist(y), b = rep(x$b, lengths(y)))
#  a    b
#1 a 2016
#2 b 2016
#3 c 2016
#4 d 2019
#5 e 2019

    Data:

    x <- data.frame(a = c("a;b;c", "d;e"), b = c(2016, 2019))