Separate a column of a dataframe in undefined number of columns with R/tidyverse [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can first count the number of columns it can take and then use separate.

nmax <- max(stringr::str_count(df$x, "\\.")) + 1
tidyr::separate(df, x, paste0("col", seq_len(nmax)), sep = "\\.", fill = "right")

#  col1 col2 col3
#1    a <NA> <NA>
#2    a    b <NA>
#3    a    b    c
#4    a    b    d
#5    a    d <NA>