strsplit by row and distribute results by column in data.frame

Question

So I have the data.frame

dat = data.frame(x = c(\'Sir Lancelot the Brave\', \'King Arthur\',  
                       \'The Black Knight\', \'The Rabbit\'), stri         


        

Answer 1

Here's one option. The single complication is that you need to first convert each vector to a data.frame with one row, as data.frames are what rbind.fill() expects.

library(plyr)
rbind.fill(lapply(sbt, function(X) data.frame(t(X))))
#     X1       X2     X3    X4
# 1  Sir Lancelot    the Brave
# 2 King   Arthur     
# 3  The    Black Knight  
# 4  The   Rabbit     

My own inclination, though, would be to just use base R, like this:

n <- max(sapply(sbt, length))
l <- lapply(sbt, function(X) c(X, rep(NA, n - length(X))))
data.frame(t(do.call(cbind, l)))
#     X1       X2     X3    X4
# 1  Sir Lancelot    the Brave
# 2 King   Arthur     
# 3  The    Black Knight  
# 4  The   Rabbit