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

Just read the data directly by read.csv with fill=TRUE and header=FALSE. you can decide to change it to matrix by as.matrix()

    read.csv(text=df,fill=T,header=F,na.strings = "")
      V1        V2
1   John   3 years
2 Mokobe  11 years
3   Ivan         

Turning to a matrix. Although not necessary

as.matrix(read.csv(text=df,fill=1,h=0,na.strings = ""))
     V1       V2         
[1,] "John"   " 3 years" 
[2,] "Mokobe" " 11 years"
[3,] "Ivan"   NA