This seemingly should be quite simple but I can't solve it: I have a long character vector of geographic data (data frame column named "XY") whose elements vary in length (from 11 to 14 chars). Each element is structured as a set of digits, then an underscore, then more digits, e.g:
> data.frame(head(as.character(XY))) head.as.character.XY.. 1 -448623_854854 2 -448563_854850 3 -448442_854842 4 -448301_854833 5 -448060_854818 6 -446828_854736 I simply need to separate the two sets of digits from each other and assign them into new columns. The closest I've been able to get is by: > test=t(as.matrix(data.frame(head(strsplit(as.character(XY), "\\_"))))) > test [,1] [,2] c...448623....854854.. "-448623" "854854" c...448563....854850.. "-448563" "854850" c...448442....854842.. "-448442" "854842" c...448301....854833.. "-448301" "854833" c...448060....854818.. "-448060" "854818" c...446828....854736.. "-446828" "854736" So far so good, but columns 1:2 will not coerce to either numeric or integer, for unknown reasons. Thanks for any help (and/or suggestions on a better way to code this). Jim Bouldin, PhD Research Ecologist Department of Plant Sciences, UC Davis Davis CA, 95616 530-554-1740 ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.