R: How to read a file into a data table with different splits?

Question

I have a data file that looks like this:

ABC 123456789
DEF 987654321
GHI 123456789

I want to put this in a data table (in R) in this way:

ABC 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
DEF 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
GHI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

So, the ABC together in one column, and the numbers each apart in separate columns.

I know how to split the data, and of course the numbers must be split by ''. But I don't know how to use this in this case, because I don't want to split the entire file by ''; only the second 'column', with the numbers.

Could anyone explain this to me?

Answer 1

We can use some regular expressions and read.table as follows. One can also use read.csv. The point is to introduce a comma separator and then use that to read in the data. See notes below:

res <- read.table(text=gsub("([0-9])()","\\1,","ABC 123456789
 DEF 987654321
 GHI 123456789"), sep = ",")[-10]
 library(dplyr) # Just the pipe
 res %>% 
   tidyr::separate(V1,c("ROW","FIRST"))
  ROW FIRST V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9
1 ABC     1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9
2 DEF     9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
3 GHI     1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9

Note

1. We can do without the separate by using a much more general regex in our gsub.
2. We can also manually remove the unwanted column(s) after the reading hence removing the [-10] used above. It is possible that one may not know the length in which case str might be useful.