Split column label by number of letters/characters in R - regex

Question

I have a large dataset where all column headers are individual IDS, each 8 characters in length. I would like to split those individual IDs into 2 rows, where the first row of IDs contains the first 7 characters, and the second row contains just the last character.
Current dataset:
ID1: Indiv01A Indiv01B Indiv02A Indiv02B Speci03A Speci03B
Intended dataset:
ID1: Indiv01 Indiv01 Indiv02 Indiv02 Speci03 Speci03
ID2: A B A B A B
I've looked through other posts on splitting data, but they all seem to have a unique way to separate the column name (ie: there's a comma separating the 2 components, or a period).
This is the code I'm thinking would work best, but I just can't figure out how to code for "7 characters" as the split point, rather than a comma:
sapply(strsplit(as.character(d$ID), ",")
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Here's a regular expression for a solution with strsplit. It splits the string between the 7th and the 8th character:
ID1 <- c("Indiv01A", "Indiv01B", "Indiv02A", "Indiv02B", "Speci03A", "Speci03B")
res <- strsplit(ID1, "(?<=.{7})", perl = TRUE)
# [[1]]
# [1] "Indiv01" "A"
#
# [[2]]
# [1] "Indiv01" "B"
#
# [[3]]
# [1] "Indiv02" "A"
#
# [[4]]
# [1] "Indiv02" "B"
#
# [[5]]
# [1] "Speci03" "A"
#
# [[6]]
# [1] "Speci03" "B"
Now, you can use rbind to create two columns:
do.call(rbind, res)
# [,1] [,2]
# [1,] "Indiv01" "A"
# [2,] "Indiv01" "B"
# [3,] "Indiv02" "A"
# [4,] "Indiv02" "B"
# [5,] "Speci03" "A"
# [6,] "Speci03" "B"
Explanation of the regex pattern:
(?<=.{7})
The (?<=) is a (positive) lookbehind. It matches any position that is preceded by the specified pattern. Here, the pattern is .{7}. The dot (.) matches any character. {7} means 7 times. Hence, the regex matches the position that is preceded by exactly 7 characters.

Answer 2

Here is a gsubfn solution:
library(gsubfn)
strapplyc(ID1, "(.*)(.)", simplify = cbind)
which gives this matrix:
[,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,] "Indiv01" "Indiv01" "Indiv02" "Indiv02" "Speci03" "Speci03"
[2,] "A" "B" "A" "B" "A" "B"
or use rbind in place of cbind if you want two columns (rather than two rows).

Answer 3

There are a couple of ways you could go about this.
To extract the final character
First, with substr:
new.vec <- sapply(old.vec, function(x) substr(x, nchar(x), nchar(x)))
or, with sub:
new.vec <- sub('.*(.)', '\\1', old.vec)
where old.vec is the vector of strings that you want to split.
For interest, the latter option uses a regular expression that translates to: "capture (indicating by surrounding with parentheses) the single character (.) that follows zero or more other characters (.*), and replace matches with the captured content (\\1)". For more info, see ?gsub, and here.
The above options allow for varying string lengths. However, if you do always want to split after 7 characters, and the second part of the string always has just a single character, then the following should work:
new.vec <- substr(old.vec, 8, 8)
(Edited to include method for extracting the first part of the string.)
To extract all but the final character
The process is similar.
new.vec <- sapply(old.vec, function(x) substr(x, 1, nchar(x) - 1))
new.vec <- sub('(.*).', '\\1', old.vec)
new.vec <- substr(old.vec, 1, 7)