strsplit by row and distribute results by column in data.frame

Question

So I have the data.frame

dat = data.frame(x = c(\'Sir Lancelot the Brave\', \'King Arthur\',  
                       \'The Black Knight\', \'The Rabbit\'), stri         


        

Answer 1

sbt = strsplit(dat$x, " ")
sbt
#[[1]]
#[1] "Sir"      "Lancelot" "the"      "Brave"   
#[[2]]
#[1] "King"   "Arthur"
#[[3]]
#[1] "The"    "Black"  "Knight"
#[[4]]
#[1] "The"    "Rabbit"

ncol = max(sapply(sbt,length))
ncol
# [1] 4

as.data.table(lapply(1:ncol,function(i)sapply(sbt,"[",i)))
#      V1       V2     V3    V4
# 1:  Sir Lancelot    the Brave
# 2: King   Arthur     NA    NA
# 3:  The    Black Knight    NA
# 4:  The   Rabbit     NA    NA