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)

Answer 2

Try

library(splitstackshape)
cSplit(df1, 'V1', ' ')

Or

library(tidyr)
separate(df1, 'V1', paste0('V', 1:4), sep= ' ', extra='drop')

Or using base R

read.table(text=df1$V1, sep=' ', fill=TRUE)

NOTE: Used the column name as 'V1' and dataset as 'df1'