Is there any command to create new columns and include the characters?

Having a dataframe such as this:

df <- data.frame(id = c(1,2,3), date1 = c("2014-Dec 2018","2009-2010","Jan 2009-Aug 2010"), date2 = c("Feb 2016-Dec 2018","2014-Dec 2018","Oct 2013-Dec 2018"))

How is it possible to create a new one which will have in every column the number of characters, taking into consideration the missing values and insert in them 0

Example output

data.frame(id = c(1,2,3), date1_count_character = c("13","9","17"), date2 = c("17","13","17"))

>Solution :

What about something like this:

cbind(id = df[,1],as.data.frame(lapply(df[,-1], nchar)))

  id date1 date2
1  1    13    17
2  2     9    13
3  3    17    17

In case of NAs:

res <- cbind(id = df[,1],as.data.frame(lapply(df[,-1], nchar)))
res[is.na(res)] <- 0
  id date1 date2
1  1    13    17
2  2     9    13
3  3     0    17

With data with a NA:

df <- data.frame(id = c(1,2,3), date1 = c("2014-Dec 2018","2009-2010",NA), date2 = c("Feb 2016-Dec 2018","2014-Dec 2018","Oct 2013-Dec 2018"))