Splitting one column to three columns for uneven characters in r

Question

I have tried to split a single column to three columns. But I failed. I have the following data set

> dat
 name
 Jhon Austin B 100kg
 Mick Gray C 110kg
 Tom Jef A 30kg

First I tried to extract last word using following codes

library(tidyr)

   dt<-dat %>% separate(name, into = c('name', 'pack'), sep = -6, convert = TRUE)

I got the following one

name           pack
Jhon Austin B  100kg
Mick Gray C    110kg
Tom Jef        A30kg

Where A was added with 30 kg. Though both should be in separate column. My final result should be like this

name         class   pack
Jhon Austin   B      100kg
Mick Gray     C      110kg
Tom Jef       A      30kg

I will be grateful if anyone helps me. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

• Option 1

You could try separate_wider_regex

dat %>%
    separate_wider_regex(
        name,
        patterns = c(name = ".*", " ", class = "\\w", " ", pack = "\\d+kg")
    )

• Option 2

With base R, you can try sub + read.table

with(
    dat,
    setNames(
        read.table(
            text =
                sub("^(.*)\\s(\\w)\\s(\\d+.*)$", "\\1_\\2_\\3", name),
            sep = "_"
        ),
        c("name", "class", "pack")
    )
)

which gives

# A tibble: 3 × 3
  name        class  pack
  <chr>       <chr> <chr>
1 Jhon Austin B     100kg
2 Mick Gray   C     110kg
3 Tom Jef     A     30kg

data

dat <- data.frame(
    name = c(
        "Jhon Austin B 100kg",
        "Mick Gray C 110kg",
        "Tom Jef A 30kg"
    )
)