[R] split a character variable into several character variable by a character

[Francisco J. Zagmutt]

Hello Mao,

If the popcode variable has a fixed number of characters (i.e each entry 
has 9 characters), you can use a simple call to substr:

dat<-read.table("clipboard", header=T)#Read from your email
varleft<-substr(dat$popcode,0,6)
varright<-substr(dat$popcode,8,9)
datnew<-data.frame(dat,varleft,varright)

 > datnew
      popcode     codetot   p3need varleft varright
1  BCPy01-01 BCPy01-01-1 100.0000  BCPy01       01
2  BCPy01-01 BCPy01-01-2 100.0000  BCPy01       01
3  BCPy01-01 BCPy01-01-3 100.0000  BCPy01       01
4  BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-1  92.5926  BCPy01       02
5  BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-1 100.0000  BCPy01       02
6  BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-2  92.5926  BCPy01       02
7  BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-2 100.0000  BCPy01       02
8  BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-3  92.5926  BCPy01       02
9  BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-3 100.0000  BCPy01       02
10 BCPy01-03 BCPy01-03-1 100.0000  BCPy01       03


You can use a similar construction for codetot.

I hope this helps,

Francisco

Francisco J. Zagmutt
Vose Consulting
2891 20th Street
Boulder, CO, 80304
USA
francisco at voseconsulting.com
www.voseconsulting.com

Mao Jianfeng wrote:
> Dear, R-lister,
> 
> I have a dataframe like the followed. And, I want to split a character
> variable ("popcode", or "codetot") into several new variables. For example,
> split "BCPy01-01" (in popcode) into "BCPy01" and "01". I need to know how to
> do that. I have tried strsplit() and substring() functions. But, I still can
> not perform the spliting.
> 
> Any advice? Thanks in advance.
> 
> df1:
> popcode     codetot   p3need
> BCPy01-01 BCPy01-01-1 100.0000
> BCPy01-01 BCPy01-01-2 100.0000
> BCPy01-01 BCPy01-01-3 100.0000
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-1  92.5926
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-1 100.0000
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-2  92.5926
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-2 100.0000
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-3  92.5926
> BCPy01-02 BCPy01-02-3 100.0000
> BCPy01-03 BCPy01-03-1 100.0000
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mao Jian-feng
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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