Question

I have a dataframe with one column that I would like to split into several columns, but the number of splits is dynamic throughout the rows.

Var1
====
A/B
A/B/C
C/B
A/C/D/E

I have tried using colsplit(df$Var1,split="/",names=c("Var1","Var2","Var3","Var4")), but rows with less than 4 variables will repeat.

From Hansi, the desired output would be:

     Var1 Var2 Var3 Var4
[1,] "A"  "B"  NA   NA  
[2,] "A"  "B"  "C"  NA  
[3,] "C"  "B"  NA   NA  
[4,] "A"  "C"  "D"  "E" 

Answer 1

> read.table(text=as.character(df$Var1), sep="/", fill=TRUE)
  V1 V2 V3 V4
1  A  B      
2  A  B  C   
3  C  B      
4  A  C  D  E

Leading zeros in digit only fields can be preserved with colClasses="character"

a <- data.frame(Var1=c("01/B","04/B/C","0098/B","8708/C/D/E"))
read.table(text=as.character(a$Var1), sep="/", fill=TRUE, colClasses="character")
    V1 V2 V3 V4
1   01  B      
2   04  B  C   
3 0098  B      
4 8708  C  D  E