The “separate” Function in R

• Package: tidyr

• Purpose: To separate a single character column into multiple columns based on a delimiter.

• General Class: Data Reshaping

• Required Argument(s):

• data: The data frame to reshape.

• col: The name of the column to separate.

• into: The names of the new columns to create.

• Notable Optional Arguments:

• sep: The delimiter used to separate the column into multiple columns.

• remove: Whether to remove the original column after separation. The default is TRUE.

• Example (with Explanation):

• # Load necessary packages
  library(tidyr)
  
  # Create a sample data frame
  data <- data.frame(
  ID = 1:3,
  Name = c("John_Doe", "Jane_Smith", "Bob_Johnson")
  )
  
  # Separate the 'Name' column into 'First' and 'Last' columns
  result <- separate(data, col = Name, into = c("First", "Last"), sep = "_")
  
  # Display the result
  print(result)

• In this example, the separate function from the tidyr package is used to reshape the sample data frame data by separating the ‘Name’ column into ‘First’ and ‘Last’ columns. The separator _ is specified using the sep argument. The result is a new data frame result containing the reshaped data with the ‘Name’ column split into two separate columns.