Ttcols function

Text-to-columns

Splits character vector into columns of the matrix based on specified separator

Ttcols(text, missed=NA, ...)

Arguments

• text: Character vector
• missed: How to fill empty cells of the result, default is NA
• ...: Arguments to split() function

Details

Text-to-columns operation is common in spreadsheets. In R, demands for this functionality are likely also high because there are numerous solutions. Below are some most simple, flexible and extendable:

do.call(rbind, strsplit(..., split)) -- fast and easy but it recycles short rows

read.table(text=..., sep=split, fill=TRUE, colClasses="character", header=FALSE) -- does not know how many columns you want; it uses only 5 first lines and requires to specify column names otherwise

strcapture() -- needs both rows of equal length and number of future columns

stringr::str_split_fixed() -- needs number of columns to make

reshape2::colsplit() -- needs column names beforehand

tidyr::separate() -- cannot take vectors and also wants explicit column names

Ttcols() is fast, simple and flexible solution which does not have problems from above. It handles only one vector at time but it is easy to overcome because it is simple to extend and combine.

Returns

Matrix of splitted strings without separators, empty cells filled with 'missed'.

Author(s)

Alexey Shipunov

See Also

Fill

Examples

aa <- c("one,I,i", "two,II", "three", NA, "", Inf, "2 ,3, 4,_5", 15, ",a,,b")
Ttcols(aa, split=" *, *")

bb <- c("one,I,i", "two,II", "three")
Ttcols(bb, split=",")

Ttcols(row.names(mtcars), split=" ", missed="")