count the frequency with little adjustment in the order within row

I want to count the occurrences of instances that can have different orders in the given row.

df:
Col1
A;B;C
C;B;A
A;D
A;C;B
D;A
D;C

df_result:
Col    freq
A;B;C   3
A;D     2
D;C     1

>Solution :

Split the column at ;, loop over the list, sort, and paste the elements, get the frequency count with table and convert to data.frame in base R

as.data.frame(table(sapply(strsplit(df$Col1, ";"), \(x) 
      paste(sort(x), collapse = ";"))))

-output

   Var1 Freq
1 A;B;C    3
2   A;D    2
3   C;D    1

Or use separate_rows with count in tidyverse

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
library(stringr)
df %>%
  mutate(rn = row_number()) %>%
  separate_rows(Col1) %>% 
  group_by(rn) %>% 
  summarise(Col1 = str_c(sort(Col1), collapse = ";")) %>% 
  count(Col1, name = 'Freq')
# A tibble: 3 × 2
  Col1   Freq
  <chr> <int>
1 A;B;C     3
2 A;D       2
3 C;D       1

data

df <- structure(list(Col1 = c("A;B;C", "C;B;A", "A;D", "A;C;B", "D;A", 
"D;C")), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -6L))