How to separate strings of a column and store them in a vector

December 17, 2021

I have a dataframe similar to data (see example below). I would like to create a vector containing all the string characters of IIIF separated by a comma as in out.

data=data.frame(IIIT=c("a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g"), IIIF=c("aze,hyt,fre", NA, "ade", "ijh, deg","oij,erf", "eft,kij", "efg,kijj,lerod,kjhyg"))

> data
  IIIT                 IIIF
1    a          aze,hyt,fre
2    b                 <NA>
3    c                  ade
4    d             ijh, deg
5    e              oij,erf
6    f              eft,kij
7    g efg,kijj,lerod,kjhyg

> out
 [1] "aze"   "hyt"   "fre"   NA      "ade"   "ijh"   "deg"   "oij"   "erf"   "eft"   "kij"   "efg"   "kijj"  "lerod" "kjhyg"

How can I do that ?

>Solution :

Base R has strsplit() which will create a list, with each element of the list being a character vector of each separate word found in the original vector. You can then combine the results using unlist():

> unlist(strsplit(data$IIIF, split = ","))
 [1] "aze"   "hyt"   "fre"   NA      "ade"   "ijh"   " deg"  "oij"   "erf"  
[10] "eft"   "kij"   "efg"   "kijj"  "lerod" "kjhyg"