R semicolon delimited a column into rows

Question

I am using RStudio 2.15.0 and have created an object from Excel using XLConnect with 3000+ rows and 12 columns I am trying to delimit/split a column into the rows but don\'t

Answer 1

Here's a quick data.table possible solution

library(data.table)
unique(setDT(df)[, .(PolId = unlist(strsplit(as.character(PolId), ";"))), by = Description])
#    Description  PolId
# 1:       TEST1 ABC123
# 2:       TEST1 ABC456
# 3:       TEST1 ABC789
# 4:       TEST1 AAA123
# 5:       TEST2 AAA123
# 6:       TEST3 ABB123
# 7:       TEST3 ABC123

Per your edit- Another option (in case you have more than two columns)

library(splitstackshape)
unique(cSplit(df, "PolId", ";", "long"))
#     PolId Description Document.Type
# 1: ABC123       TEST1          Pol1
# 2: ABC456       TEST1          Pol1
# 3: ABC789       TEST1          Pol1
# 4: AAA123       TEST1          End1
# 5: AAA123       TEST2          End2
# 6: ABB123       TEST3          End1
# 7: ABC123       TEST3          End1