using strsplit to split a variable three ways

Question

I have a variable that I would like to split... Each line is different but it either has 2 string expression separated by a ","; 3 string expression separate by a ','; 1 string expression; or nothing at all For Example: ``` indel row1 +1C row2 +1C,+2CC row3 0 row4 +1C,+2CC,-1C ``` Essentially what I want to do is make 3 different variables for each of the possible three string expression. Of course, some rows will have 2, or 1 or none. I have been able to split and created two different variables for the first two string expression using: ``` mito$indel1 <- sapply(strsplit(as.character(mito$indel),","),function(x) x[1]) mito$indel2 <- sapply(strsplit(as.character(mito$indel),","),function(x) x[2]) ``` But of course, there is third string expression. I was thinking of creating a temporary indel2 variable, then splitting this again to make the third, but the problem with using the R script above is that it creates the variables as: ``` indel Indel1 Indel2 row1 +1C +1C NA row2 +1C,+2CC +…

Accepted Answer

You could also use `read.table` for this.

```
read.table(text=as.character(dat$V1), sep=',', fill=TRUE, as.is=TRUE)
#    V1   V2  V3
# 1 +1C         
# 2 +1C +2CC    
# 3   0         
# 4 +1C +2CC -1C
```

using strsplit to split a variable three ways

Solution

Problem