I have a dataframe df, which has a chr column Col1, that looks like this:

I want to create a new column, in which I count the number of words in Col1. I did this previously with this code:

df$Count <- sapply(df$Col1, function(x) {
sum(str_count(x, ";")+1)
})

It worked well until now.
I’ve recently updated the rlang package to version 1.0.6 and after updating I’m constantly getting this error:

Error in stop_vctrs():
! Input must be a vector, not an environment.
Run rlang::last_error() to see where the error occurred.

I ran rlang::last_error() :

Backtrace:

1. base::sapply(…)
2. vctrs:::stop_scalar_type(<fn>(<env>), "")
3. vctrs:::stop_vctrs(msg, "vctrs_error_scalar_type", actual = x)
   Run rlang::last_trace() to see the full context.

I also did a simple test vector with c() and tried using str_count() with this, but it gives the same error.

>Solution :

A base R approach to count the number of words separated by a ";" is:

lengths(gregexpr(";", df$Col1)) + 1
# [1] 3 2

To create a new column, simply:

df$NewCol <- lengths(gregexpr(";", df$Col1)) + 1

#                Col1 NewCol
# 1 apple;orange;pear      3
# 2      orange;apple      2

Data

df <- data.frame(Col1 = c("apple;orange;pear","orange;apple"))