Question

I have a data frame where each cell are 2 character strings (ie: “AA” , “BC” , “CD”) where I am trying to put spaces between each of the two characters, and where NA values remain as is. I can’t seem to figure this out. Any help????

Here is an example data frame:

 df <- data.frame(col1=c("AB", "CD", "EF"), col2=c("AA", "BB", "CC"), col3=c("XX", "YY", NA))

And this is what the example data frame looks like:

   col1 col2 col3
1   AB   AA   XX
2   CD   BB   YY
3   EF   CC <NA>

This is what i want my data frame to look like:

   col1  col2  col3
1   A B   A A   X X
2   C D   B B   Y Y
3   E F   C C   <NA>

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Here’s one way

df2 <- data.frame(lapply(df, function(x) {
  levels(x) <- gsub("(.)(.)", "\\1 \\2", levels(x))
  return(x)
}))

df2

#   col1 col2 col3
# 1  A B  A A  X X
# 2  C D  B B  Y Y
# 3  E F  C C <NA>

This of course relies on the assumption that, when creating the data.frame df the argument stringsAsFactors is TRUE.