How to split a character vector into data frame?

Question

I\'m still relatively new to R and hope you can again help me. I have a character vector with a length of 42000. The vector looks like this:

a <- c(\"blab         


        

Answer 1

You can almost use read.table directly, but your date format isn't the same as what R would use for the colClasses argument.

No problem. Just specify your own class and proceed :-)

## Create a class called "ymdDate"
setClass("ymdDate")
setAs("character", "ymdDate", function(from) as.Date(from, format="%Y%m%d"))

## Use `read.table` on your character vector. For convenience, I've
##   used `gsub` to get rid of the `.tsv` in before reading it in.
out <- read.table(text = gsub(".tsv$", "", a), header = FALSE, 
                  sep = "-", colClasses=c("character", "ymdDate", "integer"))
out
#          V1         V2 V3
# 1 blablabla 1996-01-01  1
# 2 blablabla 1996-01-01  2
# 3 blablabla 1996-01-01  3
str(out)
# 'data.frame':  3 obs. of  3 variables:
#  $ V1: chr  "blablabla" "blablabla" "blablabla"
#  $ V2: Date, format: "1996-01-01" "1996-01-01" "1996-01-01"
#  $ V3: int  1 2 3