assign dynamic variable names using a loop and mutate from dplyr

Question

I would like to split a character field into individual variables, one for each character in a string.

library(dplyr)
temp1 <- data.frame(a = c('dedefdewfe' , 'rewewqreqw'))


for(i in 1:10){

  temp1 <- temp1 %>% 
    mutate(paste('v' , i , ,sep = '') = substr(a , i , i))
}

The resulting dataframe would have 11 variables, the original a , v1 through v10

Ben Bolker · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-25 00:10:28Z

3

tidyr::separate is good for this. You can't split on an empty string, but you can specify splitting positions ...

library(tidyr)
library(dplyr)
temp1 %>% 
  mutate(b=a) %>%   ## make a copy
  separate(b,into=paste0("v",1:10),sep=1:9)

(probably better practice to use nc <- nchar(temp1$a[1]) and then use nc, nc-1 instead of 10, 9 respectively)

answered Jul 25, 2017 at 0:10

Ben Bolker

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1 Comment

Ben Bolker Over a year ago

you might want to consider editing your title to something like "split a character column of a data frame into multiple columns" - i.e., make it about what you're trying to accomplish rather than the particular approach

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