To be clear, I can do that with nested for loops: v <- c("A1B2","A3C4","B5","C6A7B8") l <- strsplit(gsub("(.{2})","\\1,",v),",") d <- data.frame(A=vector(length=4,mode="integer"), B=vector(length=4,mode="integer"), C=vector(length=4,mode="integer"))
for (i in 1:length(l)) { l1 <- l[[i]] for (j in 1:length(l1)) { d[[substring(l1[j],1,1)]][i] <- as.numeric(substring(l1[j],2,2)) } } but I am afraid that handling 1,000,000 (=length(unlist(l))) strings in a loop will kill me. > * Sam Steingold <f...@tah.bet> [2012-02-08 15:34:38 -0500]: > > Suppose I have a vector of strings: > c("A1B2","A3C4","B5","C6A7B8") > [1] "A1B2" "A3C4" "B5" "C6A7B8" > where each string is a sequence of <column><value> pairs > (fixed width, in this example both value and name are 1 character, in > reality the column name is 6 chars and value is 2 digits). > I need to convert it to a data frame: > data.frame(A=c(1,3,0,7),B=c(2,0,5,8),C=c(0,4,0,6)) > A B C > 1 1 2 0 > 2 3 0 4 > 3 0 5 0 > 4 7 8 6 > > how do I do that? > thanks. -- Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) X 11.0.11004000 http://palestinefacts.org http://iris.org.il http://camera.org http://ffii.org http://www.PetitionOnline.com/tap12009/ An elephant is a mouse with an operating system. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.