Here is one way. > dat V1 1 43-156 2 43-43 3 1267-18
> dat <- within(dat, { + m <- do.call("rbind", strsplit(as.character(V1), "-")) + XX <- as.numeric(m[,1]) + YY <- as.numeric(m[,2]) + rm(m) + }) > dat V1 YY XX 1 43-156 156 43 2 43-43 43 43 3 1267-18 18 1267 > Bill Venables CSIRO/CMIS Cleveland Laboratories -----Original Message----- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of ZeMajik Sent: Tuesday, 9 February 2010 9:32 AM To: R mailing list Subject: [R] Dividing one column of form xx-yy into two columns, xx and yy I have a data set where one column consists of two numerical factors, separated by a "-". So my data looks something like this: 43-156 43-43 1267-18 . . . There are additional columns consisting of single factors as well, so reading the csv file (where the data is stored) with the sep="-" addition won't work since the rest of the factors are separated by commas. So first of all, is there any way to import a file which is separated by "," OR "-"? If this is not possible, does anyone have any ideas how I could go about to separate these? I could use a text editor to replace the - with , and import, but I would prefer doing this inside of R so that making a script could be used in the future. Just to clarify, I would like the above to turn out as two separate columns (or vectors) where the first in this would be (43,43,1267,....) and the second (156,43,18,.....) The dataset is rather large, with a few hundred thousand lines, so it would be preferable to keep resource intensive methods to a minimum if possible. Thanks in advance! Mike [[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.