Separating column using separate (tidyr) via dplyr on a first encountered digit

Question

I\'m trying to separate a rather messy column into two columns containing period and description. My data resembles the extract below:

set.         


        

Answer 1

You could also use unglue::unnest() :

dta <- data.frame(indicator=c("someindicator2001", "someindicator2011",
                              "some text 20022008", "another indicator 2003"),
                  values = runif(n = 4))

# remotes::install_github("moodymudskipper/unglue")
library(unglue)
unglue_unnest(dta, indicator, "{indicator}{=\\s*}{period=\\d*}")
#>       values         indicator   period
#> 1 0.43234262     someindicator     2001
#> 2 0.65890900     someindicator     2011
#> 3 0.93576805         some text 20022008
#> 4 0.01934736 another indicator     2003

^{Created on 2019-09-14 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}