[R] split strings in a vector and convert it to a data.frame

[David Winsemius]

On Feb 9, 2010, at 6:46 PM, Martin Batholdy wrote:

> hi,
>
> I have a vector full of strings like;
>
>
> xy_100_ab	xy_101_ab	xy_102_ab	xy_103_ab
>
>
> I want to seperate each string in three pieces and the separator  
> should be the "_"
>
> at the end I want a data.frame like:
>
> column1 column2 column3
> xy		100			ab
> xy		101			ab
> xy		102			ab
> xy		103			ab
>

There are probably easier ways but this works:

 > as.data.frame( t(sapply(1:4, function(x) strsplit(vec, "_")[[x]])) )
   V1  V2 V3
1 xy 100 ab
2 xy 101 ab
3 xy 102 ab
4 xy 103 ab

I needed to transpose the matrix that resulted from the "sideways  
presentation" of the data.

>
> I tried strsplit but I couldn't figure out how to convert the list I  
> get into a data.frame.
>
> I just need a function like read.table. But it seems that read.table  
> only can handle files, not vectors...
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David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT