Question

I am coding a survey that outputs a .csv file. Within this csv I have some entries that are space delimited, which represent multi-select questions (e.g. questions with more than one response). In the end I want to parse these space delimited entries into their own columns and create headers for them so i know where they came from.

For example I may start with this (note that the multiselect columns have an _M after them):

Q1, Q2_M, Q3, Q4_M
6, 1 2 88, 3, 3 5 99
6, , 3, 1 2

and I want to go to this:

Q1, Q2_M_1, Q2_M_2, Q2_M_88, Q3, Q4_M_1, Q4_M_2, Q4_M_3, Q4_M_5, Q4_M_99
6, 1, 1, 1, 3, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1
6,,,,3,1,1,0,0,0

I imagine this is a relatively common issue to deal with but I have not been able to find it in the R section. Any ideas how to do this in R after importing the .csv ? My general thoughts (which often lead to inefficient programs) are that I can:
(1) pull column numbers that have the special suffix with grep()
(2) loop through (or use an apply) each of the entries in these columns and determine the levels of responses and then create columns accordingly
(3) loop through (or use an apply) and place indicators in appropriate columns to indicate presence of selection

I appreciate any help and please let me know if this is not clear.

Answer 1

I agree with ran2 and aL3Xa that you probably want to change the format of your data to have a different column for each possible reponse. However, if you munging your dataset to a better format proves problematic, it is possible to do what you asked.

process_multichoice <- function(x) lapply(strsplit(x, " "), as.numeric)

q2 <- c("1 2 3 NA 4", "2 5")
processed_q2 <- process_multichoice(q2)
[[1]]
[1]  1  2  3 NA  4

[[2]]
[1] 2 5

The reason different columns for different responses are suggested is because it is still quite unpleasant trying to retrieve any statistics from the data in this form. Although you can do things like

# Number of reponses given
sapply(processed_q2, length)

#Frequency of each response
table(unlist(processed_q2), useNA = "ifany")

EDIT: One more piece of advice. Keep the code that processes your data separate from the code that analyses it. If you create any graphs, keep the code for creating them separate again. I’ve been down the road of mixing things together, and it isn’t pretty. (Especially when you come back to the code six months later.)