How can I split a character string in a dataframe into multiple columns

Question

I\'m working with a dataframe, one column of which contains values that are mostly numeric but may contain non-numeric entries. I would like to split this column into multiple

Answer 1

You can use separate() from tidyr

tidyr::separate(df, x, c("x1", "x2"), " ", fill = "left")
#   ID   x1  x2
# 1  1    < 0.1
# 2  2  100
# 3  3    A 2.5
# 4  4  200

If you absolutely need to remove the NA values, then you can do

tdy <- tidyr::separate(df, x, c("x1", "x2"), " ", fill = "left")
tdy[is.na(tdy)] <- ""

and then we have

tdy
#   ID x1  x2
# 1  1  < 0.1
# 2  2    100
# 3  3  A 2.5
# 4  4    200