R: Split character column and create two new ones

Question

R users

I have a data frame similar to this:

a <- c(\"John, 3 years\") 
b <- c(\"Mokobe, 11 years\")
c <- c(\"Ivan\")
df <- rbind(a,b,c)
df
          


        

Answer 1

we can do a strsplit by the delimiter , and then rbind the list elements after padding with NA at the end to make length same for each list element

lst <- strsplit(df[,1], ", ")
do.call(rbind, lapply(lst, `length<-`, max(lengths(lst))))
#   [,1]     [,2]      
#a "John"   "3 years" 
#b "Mokobe" "11 years"
#c "Ivan"   NA