I have a dataframe with a column containing ranges of values, as well as single values, like in the following:
x <- c("a","b")
y <- c("1:3,7","9")
dat <- data.frame("char"=x,"range"=y)
> dat
char range
1 a 1:3,7
2 b 9
What I need to do is transform the range column so that all the values contained in the ranges show up:
> dat2
char range
1 a 1,2,3,7
2 b 9
I have made progress thanks to the solution provided in this very similar question:
v1 <- c("1:3")
unlist(lapply(v1, function(x) eval(parse(text=x))))
[1] 1 2 3 9
But this only gets me so far because of course if I pass a vector which also has single values, like my original range column, it will throw an error:
v1 <- c("1:3,7","9")
unlist(lapply(v1, function(x) eval(parse(text=x))))
Error in parse(text = x) : <text>:1:4: unexpected ','
1: 1:3,
^
In addition, I can't automatically apply this solution to the dataframe column, because it returns separate numeric values and I need a character string. Any help is appreciated.
EDIT
Thanks to everyone for the very useful comments!
The following modification gives you what you want...
v1 <- c("1:3,7","9")
unlist(lapply(v1, function(x) paste(eval(parse(text=paste0("c(",x,")"))),
collapse = ",")))
[1] "1,2,3,7" "9"