Splitting a string by commas, and removing some characters

Question

Here are the values I would like to separate:

f <- data.frame(x = c("c(58663.809, 232648.355, 0)", "c(5902.873, 232674.248, 0)"))

I would like to remove the "c(", separate the two values (by the comma), and remove the final two characters "0)".

Two resulting columns should look like this:

x = c(58663.809, 5902.873),
y = c(232648.355, 232674.248)

Answer 1

Here is one option using dplyr and tidyr libraries.

From the string x we remove "c(" and ")" characters, use separate_wider_delim to divide data in different columns while dropping the last value. Finally, use type.convert to change the column values to it's respective types.

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)

f %>%
  mutate(x = gsub("c\\(|\\)", "", x)) %>%
  separate_wider_delim(x, names = c("x", "y", NA), delim = ", ") %>%
  type.convert(as.is = TRUE) %>%
  data.frame()

#          x        y
#1 58663.809 232648.4
#2  5902.873 232674.2