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

Answer 1

We can use mtabulate

library(qdapTools)
cbind(df[1], mtabulate(df$y))
#  x A B C D E
#1 1 1 0 0 0 0
#2 2 1 1 0 0 0
#3 3 0 0 1 0 0
#4 4 0 1 1 1 0
#5 5 0 0 0 0 1

Answer 2

Another idea,

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)

df %>% 
 unnest(y) %>% 
 mutate(new = 1) %>% 
 spread(y, new, fill = 0) 

#  x A B C D E
#1 1 1 0 0 0 0
#2 2 1 1 0 0 0
#3 3 0 0 1 0 0
#4 4 0 1 1 1 0
#5 5 0 0 0 0 1

Further to the cases you mentioned in comments, we can use dcast from reshape2 as it is more flexible than spread,

df2 <- df %>% 
        unnest(y) %>% 
        group_by(x) %>% 
        filter(!duplicated(y)) %>% 
        ungroup()

reshape2::dcast(df2, x ~ y, value.var = 'y', length)

#  x A B C D E
#1 1 1 0 0 0 0
#2 2 1 1 0 0 0
#3 3 0 0 1 0 0
#4 4 0 1 1 1 0
#5 5 0 0 0 0 1

#or with df$x <- c(1, 1, 2, 2, 3)

#  x A B C D E
#1 1 1 1 0 0 0
#2 2 0 1 1 1 0
#3 3 0 0 0 0 1

#or with df$x <- rep(1,5)

#  x A B C D E
#1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Answer 3

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