How to split a number into digits in R

Question

I have a data frame with a numerical ID variable which identify the Primary, Secondary and Ultimate Sampling Units from a multistage sampling scheme. I want to split the origina

Answer 1

Yet another alternative is to re-read the first column using read.fwf and specify the widths:

cbind(read.fwf(file = textConnection(as.character(df[, 1])), 
               widths = c(1, 2, 3), colClasses = "character", 
               col.names = c("ID1", "ID2", "ID3")), 
      df[-1])
#   ID1 ID2 ID3 var1 var2 var3 var4  var5
# 1   5  01 901    9 SP.1    1    W 12.10
# 2   5  01 901    9 SP.1    2    W 17.68

One advantage here is being able to set the resulting column names in a convenient manner, and ensure that the columns are characters, thus retaining any leading zeroes that might be present.