[R] Dividing one column of form xx-yy into two columns, xx and yy

[Ista Zahn]

Or, if you don't mind loading another library:

library(reshape)
colsplit(dat$V1, "-", names=c("va", "vb"))

-Ista

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 2:19 AM, Gabor Grothendieck
<ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you are willing to use an outside utility, tr, and you are using
> UNIX then you can pipe the input through it so read.csv sees all the
> dashes as commas:
>
>> cat("A,B-C,D
> + 1,2-3,4
> + 5,6-7,8
> + ", file = "dashcomma.dat")
>>
>> read.csv(pipe("tr - , < dashcomma.dat"))
>  A B C D
> 1 1 2 3 4
> 2 5 6 7 8
>
> On Windows tr is available from Duncan Murdoch's Rtools distribution.
> (google to find it).
>
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 6:31 PM, ZeMajik <zemajik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have a data set where one column consists of two numerical factors,
>> separated by a "-".
>> So my data looks something like this:
>>
>> 43-156
>> 43-43
>> 1267-18
>> .
>> .
>> .
>>
>> There are additional columns consisting of single factors as well, so
>> reading the csv file (where the data is stored) with the sep="-" addition
>> won't work since the rest of the factors are separated by commas.
>> So first of all, is there any way to import a file which is separated by ","
>> OR "-"?
>>
>> If this is not possible, does anyone have any ideas how I could go about to
>> separate these? I could use a text editor to replace the - with , and
>> import, but I would prefer doing this inside of R so that making a script
>> could be used in the future.
>>
>> Just to clarify, I would like the above to turn out as two separate columns
>> (or vectors) where the first in this would be (43,43,1267,....) and the
>> second (156,43,18,.....)
>> The dataset is rather large, with a few hundred thousand lines, so it would
>> be preferable to keep resource intensive methods to a minimum if possible.
>>
>> Thanks in advance!
>> Mike
>>
>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>



-- 
Ista Zahn
Graduate student
University of Rochester
Department of Clinical and Social Psychology
http://yourpsyche.org