Separate dataframe into more rows by comma in column?

July 18, 2023

Sorry if the title is confusing, but hopefully this example is clear.

I have a dataframe like this:

> dput(dt1)
structure(list(Variable = c("Apple", "Orange"), Value = c("12, 5", 
"15")), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -2L))

As you can see, the Value column contains a comma in the first row. I would like to separate this, so that the final dataframe looks like this:

> dput(dt2)
structure(list(Variable = c("Apple", "Apple", "Orange"), Value = c(12L, 
5L, 15L)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -3L))

All other columns should duplicate any time we are separating the comma.

>Solution :

You can use tidyr::separate_rows()

dt1 <- structure(list(Variable = c("Apple", "Orange"), Value = c("12, 5", 
                                                          "15")), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -2L))


tidyr::separate_rows(dt1, Value)
#> # A tibble: 3 x 2
#>   Variable Value
#>   <chr>    <chr>
#> 1 Apple    12   
#> 2 Apple    5    
#> 3 Orange   15

^{Created on 2023-07-18 by the reprex package (v2.0.0)}