Question

I would like to split one column into two within at data frame based on a delimiter. For example,

a|b
b|c

to become

a    b
b    c

within a data frame.

Thanks!

Answer 1

@Taesung Shin is right, but then just some more magic to make it into a data.frame.
I added a “x|y” line to avoid ambiguities:

df <- data.frame(ID=11:13, FOO=c('a|b','b|c','x|y'))
foo <- data.frame(do.call('rbind', strsplit(as.character(df$FOO),'|',fixed=TRUE)))

Or, if you want to replace the columns in the existing data.frame:

within(df, FOO<-data.frame(do.call('rbind', strsplit(as.character(FOO), '|', fixed=TRUE))))

Which produces:

  ID FOO.X1 FOO.X2
1 11      a      b
2 12      b      c
3 13      x      y