HI,
#In addition to, nchar1<-nchar(gsub("[^/]","",x$ID)) max(nchar1) #[1] 3 library(stringr) data.frame(str_split_fixed(x$ID,"/",max(nchar1)+1)) #or strsplit(as.character(x$ID),"/") #You can also use: strsplit(gsub("(.*)/(.*)","\\1 \\2",gsub("(.*)/(.*)/(.*)","\\1 \\2 \\3",gsub("(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)","\\1 \\2 \\3 \\4",x$ID)))," ") #[[1]] #[1] "abc" "def" #[[2]] #[1] "abc" "def" "ghi" #[[3]] #[1] "abc" #[[4]] #[1] "mno" "pqr" "st" "ab" A.K. ----- Original Message ----- From: Sapana Lohani <lohani.sap...@ymail.com> To: R help <r-help@r-project.org> Cc: Sent: Monday, August 27, 2012 2:40 PM Subject: [R] ?nchar ?strsplit Hi, my data frame is x<-data.frame(ID=c("abc/def","abc/def/ghi","abc","mno/pqr/st/ab")) I want to split my column ID using "/" as the place to split. How can I do that without telling the code how many sub-columns. I could use nchar(gsub("[^/]","",x$ID)) to get how many "/" are in each row of the column, but could not use it to split ID in. Thanks [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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. ______________________________________________ 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.