Split one column into two columns and retaining the seperator - regex

Question

I have a very large data array:
'data.frame': 40525992 obs. of 14 variables:
$ INSTNM : Factor w/ 7050 levels "A W Healthcare Educators"
$ Total : Factor w/ 3212 levels "1","10","100",
$ Crime_Type : Factor w/ 72 levels "MURD11","NEG_M11",
$ Count : num 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
The Crime_Type column contains the type of Crime and the Year, so "MURD11" is Murder in 2011. These are college campus crime statistics my kid is analyzing for her school project, I am helping when she is stuck. I am currently stuck at creating a clean data file she can analyze
Once i converted the wide file (all crime types '9' in columns) to a long file using 'gather' the file size is going from 300MB to 8 GB. The file I am working on is 8GB. do you that is the problem. How do i convert it to a data.table for faster processing?
What I want to do is to split this 'Crime_Type' column into two columns 'Crime_Type' and 'Year'. The data contains alphanumeric and numbers. There are also some special characters like NEG_M which is 'Negligent Manslaughter'.
We will replace the full names later but can some one suggest on how I separate
MURD11 --> MURD and 11 (in two columns)
NEG_M10 --> NEG_M and 10 (in two columns)
etc...
I have tried using,
df <- separate(totallong, Crime_Type, into = c("Crime", "Year"), sep = "[:digit:]", extra = "merge")
df <- separate(totallong, Crime_Type, into = c("Year", "Temp"), sep = "[:alpha:]", extra = "merge")
The first one separates the Crime as it looks for numbers. The second one does not work at all.
I also tried
df$Crime_Type<- apply (strsplit(as.character(df$Crime_Type), split="[:digit:]"))
That does not work at all. I have gone through many posts on stack-overflow and thats where I got these commands but I am now truly stuck and would appreciate your help.

Answer 1

Since you're using tidyr already (as evidenced by separate), try the extract function, which, given a regex, puts each captured group into a new column. The 'Crime_Type' is all the non-numeric stuff, and the 'Year' is the numeric stuff. Adjust the regex accordingly.
library(tidyr)
extract(df, 'Crime_Type', into=c('Crime', 'Year'), regex='^([^0-9]+)([0-9]+)$')

Answer 2

In base R, one option would be to create a unique delimiter between the non-numeric and numeric part. We can capture as a group the non-numeric ([^0-9]+) and numeric ([0-9]+) characters by wrapping it inside the parentheses ((..)) and in the replacement we use \\1 for the first capture group, followed by a , and the second group (\\2). This can be used as input vector to read.table with sep=',' to read as two columns.
df1 <- read.table(text=gsub('([^0-9]+)([0-9]+)', '\\1,\\2',
totallong$Crime_Type),sep=",", col.names=c('Crime', 'Year'))
df1
# Crime Year
#1 MURD 11
#2 NEG_M 11
If we need, we can cbind with the original dataset
cbind(totallong, df1)
Or in base R, we can use strsplit with split specifying the boundary between non-number ((?<=[^0-9])) and a number ((?=[0-9])). Here we use lookarounds to match the boundary. The output will be a list, we can rbind the list elements with do.call(rbind and convert it to data.frame
as.data.frame(do.call(rbind, strsplit(as.character(totallong$Crime_Type),
split="(?<=[^0-9])(?=[0-9])", perl=TRUE)))
# V1 V2
#1 MURD 11
#2 NEG_M 11
Or another option is tstrsplit from the devel version of data.table ie. v1.9.5. Here also, we use the same regex. In addition, there is option to convert the output columns into different class.
library(data.table)#v1.9.5+
setDT(totallong)[, c('Crime', 'Year') := tstrsplit(Crime_Type,
"(?<=[^0-9])(?=[0-9])", perl=TRUE, type.convert=TRUE)]
# Crime_Type Crime Year
#1: MURD11 MURD 11
#2: NEG_M11 NEG_M 11
If we don't need the 'Crime_Type' column in the output, it can be assigned to NULL
totallong[, Crime_Type:= NULL]
NOTE: Instructions to install the devel version are here
Or a faster option would be stri_extract_all from library(stringi) after collapsing the rows to a single string ('v2'). The alternate elements in 'v3' can be extracted by indexing with seq to create new data.frame
library(stringi)
v2 <- paste(totallong$Crime_Type, collapse='')
v3 <- stri_extract_all(v2, regex='\\d+|\\D+')[[1]]
ind1 <- seq(1, length(v3), by=2)
ind2 <- seq(2, length(v3), by=2)
d1 <- data.frame(Crime=v3[ind1], Year= v3[ind2])
Benchmarks
v1 <- do.call(paste, c(expand.grid(c('MURD', 'NEG_M'), 11:15), sep=''))
set.seed(24)
test <- data.frame(v1= sample(v1, 40525992, replace=TRUE ))
system.time({
v2 <- paste(test$v1, collapse='')
v3 <- stri_extract_all(v2, regex='\\d+|\\D+')[[1]]
ind1 <- seq(1, length(v3), by=2)
ind2 <- seq(2, length(v3), by=2)
d1 <- data.frame(Crime=v3[ind1], Year= v3[ind2])
})
#user system elapsed
#56.019 1.709 57.838
data
totallong <- data.frame(Crime_Type= c('MURD11', 'NEG_M11'))