using tidyr separate function to split by \ backslash

Question

I would like to split text in a column by '' using the separate function in tidyr. Given this example data...

library(tidyr) 
df1 <- structure(list(Parent.objectId = 1:2, Attachment.path = c("photos_attachments\\photos_image-20220602-192146.jpg", 
    "photos_attachments\\photos_image-20220602-191635.jpg")), row.names = 1:2, class = "data.frame")

And I've tried multiple variations of this...

df2 <- df1 %>%
  separate(Attachment.path,c("a","b","c"),sep="\\",remove=FALSE,extra="drop",fill="right")

Which doesn't result in an error, but it doesn't split the string into two columns, likely because I'm not using the correct regular expression for the single backslash.

Answer 1

We may need to escape

library(tidyr)
separate(df1, Attachment.path,c("a","b","c"),
        sep= "\\\\", remove=FALSE, extra="drop", fill="right")

According to ?separate

sep -... The default value is a regular expression that matches any sequence of non-alphanumeric values.

Answer 2

By splitting on \, assuming you are trying to get folder and filenames, try these 2 functions:

#get filenames
basename(df1$Attachment.path)
# [1] "photos_image-20220602-192146.jpg" "photos_image-20220602-191635.jpg"

#get foldernames
basename(dirname(df1$Attachment.path))
# [1] "photos_attachments" "photos_attachments"