[R] Separating a Complicated String Vector

[Ista Zahn]

I'm not sure what's so complicated about that (am I missing
something?). You can search using grep, and replace using gsub, so

tmpDF <- read.table(text="V1      V2
A       5
a1      1
a2      1
a3      1
a4      1
a5      1
B       4
b1      1
b2      1
b3      1
b4      1",
                    header=TRUE)
tmpDF <- tmpDF[grepl("[0-9]", tmpDF$V1), ]
data.frame(tmpDF, V3 = toupper(gsub("[0-9]", "", tmpDF$V1)))

Seems to do the trick.

Best,
Ista

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 9:41 PM, npretnar <npretnar at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a string variable (V1) in a data frame structured as follows:
>
> V1      V2
> A       5
> a1      1
> a2      1
> a3      1
> a4      1
> a5      1
> B       4
> b1      1
> b2      1
> b3      1
> b4      1
>
> I want the following:
>
> V1      V2      V3
> a1      1       A
> a2      1       A
> a3      1       A
> a4      1       A
> a5      1       A
> b1      1       B
> b2      1       B
> b3      1       B
> b4      1       B
>
> I am not sure how to go about making this transformation besides writing a long vector that contains each of the categorical string names (these are state names, so it would be a really long vector). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nicholas Pretnar
> Mizzou Economics Grad Assistant
> npretnar at gmail.com
>
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