Dataframe from a character vector where variable name and its data were stored jointly

I’ve this situation:

foo <- data.frame("vars" = c("animal: mouse | wks: 12 | site: cage | PI: 78",
                            "animal: dog | wks: 32 | GI: 0.2",
                            "animal: cat | wks: 8 | site: wild | PI: 13"))

where variable names and relative data were stored in character strings like the above example. In particular, each variable_name/its_data unit were delimited by a |. After the : there is the relative data.

I would like to have a final dataframe like this:

  animal  wks  site  PI   GI
  mouse   12   cage  78   NA
    dog   32   <NA>  NA  0.2
    cat    8   wild  13   NA

>Solution :

We may use read.dcf from base R

out <- type.convert(as.data.frame(read.dcf(
    textConnection(paste(gsub("\\s+\\|\\s+", "\n", foo$vars), 
    collapse="\n\n")))), as.is = TRUE)

-output

> out
  animal wks site PI  GI
1  mouse  12 cage 78  NA
2    dog  32 <NA> NA 0.2
3    cat   8 wild 13  NA
> str(out)
'data.frame':   3 obs. of  5 variables:
 $ animal: chr  "mouse" "dog" "cat"
 $ wks   : int  12 32 8
 $ site  : chr  "cage" NA "wild"
 $ PI    : int  78 NA 13
 $ GI    : num  NA 0.2 NA