Splitting a column in a data frame?

Question

I've got this data frame with data from IMDb in it. One of the columns has the movie title with the year attached in parentheses. Looks like this:

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

What I really want is to have the title and year separate. I've tried a couple of different things (split, strsplit), but I've had no success. I try to split on the first parentheses, but the two split functions don't seem to like non-character arguments. Anyone have any thoughts?

Answer 1

The strsplit works on character columns. So, if the column is factor class, we need to convert it to character class (as.character(..)). Here, I matching zero or more space (\\s*) followed by parenetheses (\\() or | the closing parentheses (\\)) to split

strsplit(as.character(d1$v1), '\\s*\\(|\\)')[[1]]
#[1] "The Shawshank Redemption" "1994"         

Or we can place the parentheses inside [] so that we don't have to escape \\ (as commented by @Avinash Raj)

strsplit(as.character(d1$v1), '\\s*[()]')[[1]]

data

v1 <- 'The Shawshank Redemption (1994)'
d1 <- data.frame(v1)