Separate a character column into two columns using a regular expression separator

Given either regular expression, separate() turns a single character column into two columns. Analogous to tidyr::separate, but only split into two columns only.

separate(.data, separated_colname, into, sep = "[^[:alnum:]]+", remove = TRUE)

Arguments

.data

A data frame.

separated_colname

Column name, string only.

into

Character vector of length 2.

sep

Separator between columns.

remove

If TRUE, remove input column from output data frame.

Value

A data.table

See also

separate, unite_dt

Examples

df <- data.table(x = c(NA, "a.b", "a.d", "b.c"))
df %>% separate(x, c("A", "B"))
#>         A      B
#>    <char> <char>
#> 1:   <NA>   <NA>
#> 2:      a      b
#> 3:      a      d
#> 4:      b      c
# equals to
df <- data.table(x = c(NA, "a.b", "a.d", "b.c"))
df %>% separate("x", c("A", "B"))
#>         A      B
#>    <char> <char>
#> 1:   <NA>   <NA>
#> 2:      a      b
#> 3:      a      d
#> 4:      b      c