Split Character String Using Only Last Delimiter in r

Question

I have a character variable that I would like to split into 2 variables based on a \"-\" delimiter, however, I would only like to split based on the last delimiter as there

Answer 1

A solution based on stringi and data.table: reverse the string and split it into fixed items and then reverse back:

library(stringi)
x <- c('foo - bar', 'hey-now-man', 'say-now-girl', 'fine-now')

lapply(stri_split_regex(stri_reverse(x), pattern = '[-\\s]+', n = 2), stri_reverse)

If we want to make a data.frame with this:

y <- lapply(stri_split_regex(stri_reverse(x), pattern = '[-\\s]+', n = 2), stri_reverse)

y <- setNames(data.table::transpose(y)[2:1], c('output1', 'output2'))

df <- as.data.frame(c(list(input = x), y))

# > df
# input output1 output2
# 1    foo - bar     foo     bar
# 2  hey-now-man hey-now     man
# 3 say-now-girl say-now    girl
# 4     fine-now    fine     now