R: create dummy variables based on a categorical variable *of lists* [duplicate]

Answer 1

this involves no external packages,

# thanks to Sotos for suggesting to use `unique(unlist(df$y))` instead of `LETTERS[1!:5]`
sapply(unique(unlist(df$y)), function(j) as.numeric(grepl(j, df$y)))
#     A B C D E
#[1,] 1 0 0 0 0
#[2,] 1 1 0 0 0
#[3,] 0 0 1 0 0
#[4,] 0 1 1 1 0
#[5,] 0 0 0 0 1