conditional string splitting in R (using tidyr) - regex

Question

I have a data frame like this:
X <- data.frame(value = c(1,2,3,4),
variable = c("cost", "cost", "reed_cost", "reed_cost"))
I'd like to split the variable column into two; one column to indicate if the variable is a 'cost' and another column to indicate whether or not the variable is "reed". I cannot seem to figure out the right regex for the split (e.g. using tidyr)
If my data were something nicer, say:
Y <- data.frame(value = c(1,2,3,4),
variable = c("adjusted_cost", "adjusted_cost", "reed_cost", "reed_cost"))
Then this is trivial with tidyr:
separate(Y, variable, c("Type", "Model"), "_")
and bingo. Instead, it looks like I need some kind of conditional statement to split on "_" if it is present, and otherwise split on the start of the pattern ("^").
I tried:
separate(X, variable, c("Policy-cost", "Reed"), "(?(_)_|^)", perl=TRUE)
but no luck. I realize I cannot even split to an empty string successfully:
separate(X, variable, c("Policy-cost", "Reed"), "^", perl=TRUE)
how should I do this?
Edit Note that this is a minimal example of a larger problem, in which there are many possible variables (not just cost and reed_cost) so I do not want to string match each one.
I am looking for a solution that splits arbitrary variables by the _ pattern if present and otherwise splits them into a blank string and the original label.
I also realize I could just grep for the presence of _ and then construct the columns manually. That's fine if rather less elegant; it seems there should be a way to split on a string using a conditional that can return an empty string...

Answer 1

Assuming you may or may not have a separator and that cost and reed aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, why not search for the specific string instead of the separator?
Example:
library(stringr)
X <- data.frame(value = c(1,2,3,4),
variable = c("cost", "cost", "reed_cost", "reed_cost"))
X$cost <- str_detect(X$variable,"cost")
X$reed <- str_detect(X$variable,"reed")

Answer 2

You could try:
X$variable <- ifelse(!grepl("_", X$variable), paste0("_", X$variable), as.character(X$variable))
separate(X, variable, c("Policy-cost", "Reed"), "_")
# value Policy-cost Reed
#1 1 cost
#2 2 cost
#3 3 reed cost
#4 4 reed cost
Or
X$variable <- gsub("\\b(?=[A-Za-z]+\\b)", "_", X$variable, perl=T)
X$variable
#[1] "_cost" "_cost" "reed_cost" "reed_cost"
separate(X, variable, c("Policy-cost", "Reed"), "_")
Explanation
\\b(?=[A-Za-z]+\\b) : matches a word boundary \\b and looks ahead for characters followed by word boundary. The third and fourth elements does not match, so it was not replaced.

Answer 3

Another approach with base R:
cbind(X["value"],
setNames(as.data.frame(t(sapply(strsplit(as.character(X$variable), "_"),
function(x)
if (length(x) == 1) c("", x)
else x))),
c("Policy-cost", "Reed")))
# value Policy-cost Reed
# 1 1 cost
# 2 2 cost
# 3 3 reed cost
# 4 4 reed cost