How Do I Split a Column Using R?

Let's take a hypothetical example where you have scraped data from a website displaying football/soccer results. You find yourself with this data:

df <- data.frame(
  match_id = c(1,2,3,4),
  home_team = c("Chelsea", "Arsenal", "Liverpool", "Fulham"),
  away_team = c("Newcastle", "West Ham", "Tottenham", "Everton"),
  score = c("2-2", "2-1", "1-1", "1-3")
)


df

match_id  home_team  away_team  score
       1    Chelsea  Newcastle    2-2
       2    Arsenal   West Ham    2-1
       3  Liverpool  Tottenham    1-1
       4     Fulham    Everton    1-3

And you wish to separate the score column into separate columns, one for home goals scored, and another for away goals scored.

Method One: Using `tidyr::separate`

Mandatory arguments are:

	`data`		the dataframe or tibble
	`col`		the source column to split
	`into`		the target columns to receive the split data
	`sep`		the separator to split the column by

# install the tidyr package if not installed
# install.packages('tidyr')

tidyr::separate(data = df,
                col = 'score',
                into = c('home_score', 'away_score'),
                sep = '-')

match_id  home_team  away_team  home_score  away_score
       1    Chelsea  Newcastle           2           2
       2    Arsenal   West Ham           2           1
       3  Liverpool  Tottenham           1           1
       4     Fulham    Everton           1           3

How do I retain the original column?

By default, the target columns replace the source column in the resulting dataframe. In order to retain the source column, use the remove = F flag,

tidyr::separate(data = df,
                col = 'score',
                into = c('home_score', 'away_score'),
                sep = '-',
                remove = F)

match_id  home_team  away_team  score  home_score  away_score
       1    Chelsea  Newcastle    2-2           2           2
       2    Arsenal   West Ham    2-1           2           1
       3  Liverpool  Tottenham    1-1           1           1
       4     Fulham    Everton    1-3           1           3

How Do I Split a Column Using R?

Method One: Using tidyr::separate

How do I retain the original column?

Other similar or related articles

Method One: Using `tidyr::separate`