Separate string to columns by each character

Question

in my dataframe I have a column with long string like this

df$string 
AVDSFBKLDF

What I need is to separate each character and create new column for it. Name of the columns is q1, q2 and so on. For similar cases like spliting string by symbol and put it into the new columns I used this code

df %>% separate(string, into = paste0('q', 1:10), sep = "")

It worked fine but now when I want to split string by each characters I'm getting some blank warning my console and my code do not works.

Answer 1

The data.table package provides the function tstrsplit that you might consider.

a<- c("AVDSFBKLDF", "GH", "ABCD")

library(data.table)
DT <- data.table(a)
DT_wide <- DT[, tstrsplit(a, "")]

# change column names
setnames(DT_wide, paste0("q", seq_len(ncol(DT_wide))))
DT_wide
#   q1 q2   q3   q4   q5   q6   q7   q8   q9  q10
#1:  A  V    D    S    F    B    K    L    D    F
#2:  G  H <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA>
#3:  A  B    C    D <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA>

If you want to continue to work with a dataframe, type setDF(DT_wide) at the end.

Answer 2

Use the below code. i have used stringr package str_split_fixed function to create new columns.

a<- c("AVDSFBKLDF")

library(stringr)
d<- data.frame(str_split_fixed(a, "", max(nchar(a))))

I hope this helps

Answer 3

You could try :

df<- data.frame(string=c("ABCDEF","GH"))
df %>% mutate(v=str_split(string,"(?=.)")) %>% unnest %>%
  filter(v!="") %>% 
  group_by(string) %>% mutate(k=paste0("q",row_number())) %>% ungroup %>%
  spread(k,v) 
## A tibble: 2 x 7
#  string q1    q2    q3    q4    q5    q6   
#  <fct>  <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#1 ABCDEF A     B     C     D     E     F    
#2 GH     G     H     <NA>  <NA>  <NA>  <NA>