Splitting text column into ragged multiple new columns in a data table in R

Question

I have a data table containing 20000+ rows and one column. The string in each column has different number of words. I want to split the words and put each of them in a new c

Answer 1

Check out cSplit from my "splitstackshape" package. It works on either data.frames or data.tables (but always returns a data.table).

Assuming KFB's sample data is at least slightly representative of your actual data, you can try:

library(splitstackshape)
cSplit(df, "x", " ")
#     x_1      x_2         x_3 x_4
# 1: This       is interesting  NA
# 2: This actually          is not

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Another (blazing) option is to use stri_split_fixed with simplify = TRUE (from "stringi") (which is obviously deemed to enter the "splitstackshape" code soon):

library(stringi)
stri_split_fixed(df$x, " ", simplify = TRUE)
#      [,1]   [,2]       [,3]          [,4] 
# [1,] "This" "is"       "interesting" NA   
# [2,] "This" "actually" "is"          "not"