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- Split comma-separated strings in a column into separate rows 4 answers
I have a data.frame
where one of the variables is a vector (or a list), like this:
MyColumn <- c("A, B,C", "D,E", "F","G")
MyDF <- data.frame(group_id=1:4, val=11:14, cat=MyColumn)
# group_id val cat
# 1 1 11 A, B,C
# 2 2 12 D,E
# 3 3 13 F
# 4 4 14 G
I'd like to have a new data frame with as many rows as the vector
FlatColumn <- unlist(strsplit(MyColumn,split=","))
which looks like this:
MyNewDF <- data.frame(group_id=c(rep(1,3),rep(2,2),3,4), val=c(rep(11,3),rep(12,2),13,14), cat=FlatColumn)
# group_id val cat
# 1 1 11 A
# 2 1 11 B
# 3 1 11 C
# 4 2 12 D
# 5 2 12 E
# 6 3 13 F
# 7 4 14 G
In essence, for every factor which is an element of the list of MyColumn
(the letters A to G), I want to assign the corresponding values of the list. Every factor appears only once in MyColumn
.
Is there a neat way for this kind of reshaping/unlisting/merging? I've come up with a very cumbersome for
-loop over the rows of MyDF
and the length of the corresponding element of strsplit(MyColumn,split=",")
. I'm very sure that there has to be a more elegant way.