tidyr use separate_rows over multiple columns

Question

I have a data.frame where some cells contain strings of comma separate values:

d <- data.frame(a=c(1:3), 
       b=c(\"name1, name2, name3\", \"name4\",          


        

Answer 1

Here's an alternative approach using splitstackshape::cSplit and zoo::na.locf.

library(splitstackshape)
library(zoo)

df <- cSplit(d, 1:ncol(d), "long", sep = ",")
na.locf(df[rowSums(is.na(df)) != ncol(df),])
#    a     b      c
#1:  1 name1  name7
#2:  1 name2  name7
#3:  1 name3  name7
#4:  2 name4  name8
#5:  2 name4  name9
#6:  3 name5 name10
#7:  3 name6 name10