Hi I have a column of concatenated information stored in an RG object in the limma package and I need to split this information and then paste the first two pieces of data in each case back into two columns of the RG object.
This is how I am currently doing this gene.info.split<-strsplit(RG$genes$Name,",",fixed=TRUE) for (h in 1: length(gene.info.split)){ RG$genes$ID[h]<-gene.info.split[h][[1]][1] RG$genes$Name[h]<-gene.info.split[h][[1]][2] } However, this is very slow and presumably 'messy'. The problem is that there are an inconsistent number of comma separated entries in the original Name column so I cannot do gene.info.split<-as.data.frame(strsplit(RG$genes$Name,",",fixed=TRUE)) because I get the error message Error in data.frame(c("OligoCy3", "SP Control poplar 48pin", "A24", "no length information" : arguments imply differing number of rows: 4, 6, 5, 1 I also can't figure out how to usefully put the [list] data into a matrix (my ignorance I am sure). Ideally I would be able to put each comma separated item into a column and then simply paste the first and second columns over the RG$genes$Name and RG$genes$ID columns respectively (and do away with the for loop). Some cases in the original RG$genes$Name has only one piece of information (ie no commas) so I would need a way to fill any blanks with an NA value If anyone can help me, it would be much appreciated Nat Street --- Nathaniel Street University of Southampton Plants and Environment Lab School of Biological Sciences Basset Crescent East Southampton SO16 7PX tel: +44 (0) 2380 594268 fax: +44 (0) 2380 594269 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.populus.biol.soton.ac.uk/~nat http://del.icio.us/n.r.street ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.