R:Extracting words from one column into different columns

Question

I\'ve been figuring this out for a couple of hours now. Let\'s say I have a column with 1-4 words, separated by space:

aba bkak absbs
a2aj akls bios
sad
fasa         


        

Answer 1

With the devel verison of data.table could also do

library(data.table) # V >= 1.9.5
setDT(df)[, tstrsplit(V1, ' ')]
#      V1   V2    V3
# 1:  aba bkak absbs
# 2: a2aj akls  bios
# 3:  sad   NA    NA
# 4: fasa  lgk    NA

Or with stringi (though you'll get a matrix back)

library(stringi)
stri_split_fixed(df$V1, ' ', simplify = TRUE)