Separate a character column into multiple columns with a regular expression or numeric locations

Source: R/tidyr_methods.R

Given either a regular expression or a vector of character positions, separate() turns a single character column into multiple columns.

Arguments

sep

Separator between columns.

If character, sep is interpreted as a regular expression. The default value is a regular expression that matches any sequence of non-alphanumeric values.

If numeric, sep is interpreted as character positions to split at. Positive values start at 1 at the far-left of the string; negative value start at -1 at the far-right of the string. The length of sep should be one less than into.

extra

If sep is a character vector, this controls what happens when there are too many pieces. There are three valid options:

  • "warn" (the default): emit a warning and drop extra values.

  • "drop": drop any extra values without a warning.

  • "merge": only splits at most length(into) times

fill

If sep is a character vector, this controls what happens when there are not enough pieces. There are three valid options:

  • "warn" (the default): emit a warning and fill from the right

  • "right": fill with missing values on the right

  • "left": fill with missing values on the left

Value

A tidySingleCellExperiment objector a tibble depending on input

See also

unite(), the complement, extract() which uses regular expression capturing groups.

Examples


un <- pbmc_small %>%

    unite("new_col", c(orig.ident, groups))
un %>% separate(col=new_col, into=c("orig.ident", "groups"))
#> # A SingleCellExperiment-tibble abstraction: 80 × 17
#> # Features=230 | Cells=80 | Assays=counts, logcounts
#>    .cell orig.ident groups nCount_RNA nFeature_RNA RNA_snn_res.0.8 letter.idents
#>    <chr> <chr>      <chr>       <dbl>        <int> <fct>           <fct>        
#>  1 ATGC… SeuratPro… g2             70           47 0               A            
#>  2 CATG… SeuratPro… g1             85           52 0               A            
#>  3 GAAC… SeuratPro… g2             87           50 1               B            
#>  4 TGAC… SeuratPro… g2            127           56 0               A            
#>  5 AGTC… SeuratPro… g2            173           53 0               A            
#>  6 TCTG… SeuratPro… g1             70           48 0               A            
#>  7 TGGT… SeuratPro… g1             64           36 0               A            
#>  8 GCAG… SeuratPro… g1             72           45 0               A            
#>  9 GATA… SeuratPro… g1             52           36 0               A            
#> 10 AATG… SeuratPro… g1            100           41 0               A            
#> # ℹ 70 more rows
#> # ℹ 10 more variables: RNA_snn_res.1 <fct>, file <chr>, ident <fct>,
#> #   PC_1 <dbl>, PC_2 <dbl>, PC_3 <dbl>, PC_4 <dbl>, PC_5 <dbl>, tSNE_1 <dbl>,
#> #   tSNE_2 <dbl>