Thanks for the additional approach, Greg. I had success with Gabor's recommendation but will take a look at gsubfn as well.
Joe On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 10:19 AM, Greg Snow <538...@gmail.com> wrote: > I would suggest looking at the strapply function in the gsubfn > package. That gives you more flexibility in specifying what to look > for in the structure of the data, then extract only those pieces that > you want. > > > On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 5:16 PM, Joe Ceradini <joecerad...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Afternoon, > > > > I unfortunately inherited a dataframe with a column that has many fields > > smashed together. My goal is to split the strings in the column into > > separate columns based on patterns. > > > > Example of what I'm working with: > > > > ugly <- c("Water temp:14: F Waterbody type:Permanent Lake/Pond: Water > > pH:Unkwn: > > Conductivity:Unkwn: Water color: Clear: Water turbidity: clear: > > Manmade:no Permanence:permanent: Max water depth: <3: Primary > > substrate: Silt/Mud: Evidence of cattle grazing: none: > > Shoreline Emergent Veg(%): 1-25: Fish present: yes: Fish species: unkwn: > no > > amphibians observed") > > ugly > > > > Far as I can tell, there is not a single pattern that would work for > > splitting this string. Splitting on ":" is close but not quite > consistent. > > Each of these attributes should be a separate column: > > > > attributes <- c("Water temp", "Waterbody type", "Water pH", > "Conductivity", > > "Water color", "Water turbidity", "Manmade", "Permanence", "Max water > > depth", "Primary substrate", "Evidence of cattle grazing", "Shoreline > > Emergent Veg(%)", "Fish present", "Fish species") > > > > So, conceptually, I want to do something like this, where the string is > > split for each of the patterns in attributes. However, strsplit only uses > > the 1st value of attributes > > strsplit(ugly, attributes) > > > > Should I loop through the values of "attributes"? > > Is there an argument in strsplit I'm missing that will do what I want? > > Different approach altogether? > > > > Thanks! Happy Friday. > > Joe > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > > > ______________________________________________ > > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/ > posting-guide.html > > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > > > > -- > Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. > 538...@gmail.com > -- Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit Zoology and Physiology Dept. University of Wyoming joecerad...@gmail.com / 914.707.8506 wyocoopunit.org [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.