How to split a character vector into data frame?

Question

I\'m still relatively new to R and hope you can again help me. I have a character vector with a length of 42000. The vector looks like this:

a <- c(\"blab         


        

Answer 1

maybe with

library(reshape2)
colsplit(a, "\\-", names=c("A", "B", "C"))

          A                B     C
1 blablabla 19960101T000000Z 1.tsv
2 blablabla 19960101T000000Z 2.tsv
3 blablabla 19960101T000000Z 3.tsv

or

b <- colsplit(a, "[[:punct:]]|\\T|\\.", names=c("A", "B", "C", "D","E"))

          A        B       C D   E
1 blablabla 19960101 000000Z 1 tsv
2 blablabla 19960101 000000Z 2 tsv
3 blablabla 19960101 000000Z 3 tsv

and then

library(lubridate)
b$B <- ymd(b$B)

          A          B       C D   E
1 blablabla 1996-01-01 000000Z 1 tsv
2 blablabla 1996-01-01 000000Z 2 tsv
3 blablabla 1996-01-01 000000Z 3 tsv

str(b)
'data.frame':   3 obs. of  5 variables:
 $ A: chr  "blablabla" "blablabla" "blablabla"
 $ B: POSIXct, format: "1996-01-01" "1996-01-01" "1996-01-01"
 $ C: chr  "000000Z" "000000Z" "000000Z"
 $ D: int  1 2 3
 $ E: chr  "tsv" "tsv" "tsv"