Extract the text within each single quote using R

Question

I have a dataset containing two columns, the first column is month, and the second column is all the firms that applied for a tax compensation in this month. Each entry in this column looks like this

['firm A','firm B',...]

I want to extract the names of the first three firms that submit the application for each month, and create three new columns for the name extractions, each firm in one column.

I tried commands like

gsub("^'(.*)'.*", "\\", df)

but it didn't work properly

Answer 1

Using base R

cbind(df[1], read.csv(text = gsub("[]'[]", "",
  df$tax_compensation), header = FALSE, col.names = paste0("firm_", 1:4)))

-output

 month firm_1 firm_2 firm_3 firm_4
1   Jan firm A firm B firm C firm D
2   Feb firm B firm C firm A firm D

data

df <- structure(list(month = c("Jan", "Feb"), 
tax_compensation = c("['firm A','firm B','firm C','firm D']", 
"['firm B','firm C','firm A','firm D']")), class = "data.frame", 
row.names = c(NA, 
-2L))