CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rtidyverse
user394323
user394323

Reputation: 51

separating a column into multiple based on character position

I have something similar to this set of data

891 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
892 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
893 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
894 Rehab  2a        SQ002  2                                                                                               
895 Rehab  2a        SQ002  2                                                                                               
896 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
897 Rehab  2a        SQ002  2                                                                                               
898 Rehab  2a        SQ002  2                                                                                               
899 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
900 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1

and I am not sure how to separate the column (questionn) containing 2a into two separate columns one with "a" and one with "2". I have tried before with this

testra2<- testra1 %>% 
  separate(questionn,  
            into = c("num", "text"),
            sep= "(?=[0-9])(?<=[A-Za-z])")

but it basically just creates a blank column and I get this warning message:

"Warning message: Expected 2 pieces. Missing pieces filled with NA in 2720 rows [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, ...].

I would be grateful for any help, thank you very much:)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2411

Answers (2)

Nicolas2
Nicolas2

Reputation: 2210

testra2 <- testra1 %>% 
separate(questionn,  
        into = c("num", "text"),
        sep= "(?=[A-Za-z])")

Upvotes: 1

www
www

Reputation: 39174

You can separate by position.

library(tidyverse)

testra2<- testra1 %>% 
  separate(questionn,  
           into = c("num", "text"),
           sep = 1)

Or use the extract function.

testra3 <- testra1 %>%
  extract(questionn, into = c("num", "text"), regex = "([0-9]+)([A-Za-z]+)")

DATA

testra1 <- read.table(text = "891 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
892 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
                      893 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
                      894 Rehab  2a        SQ002  2                                                                                               
                      895 Rehab  2a        SQ002  2                                                                                               
                      896 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
                      897 Rehab  2a        SQ002  2                                                                                               
                      898 Rehab  2a        SQ002  2                                                                                               
                      899 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1                                                                                               
                      900 Rehab  2a        SQ002  1 ",
                      header = FALSE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

names(testra1) <- c("V1", "V2", "questionn", "V3", "V4")

Upvotes: 5

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