split character data into numbers and letters

Question

I have a vector of character data. Most of the elements in the vector consist of one or more letters followed by one or more numbers. I wish to split each element in the vector into the character portion and the number portion. I found a similar question on Stackoverflow.com here:

split a character from a number with multiple digits

However, the answer given above does not seem to work completely in my case or I am doing something wrong. An example vector is below:

my.data <- c("aaa", "b11", "b21", "b101", "b111", "ccc1", "ddd1", "ccc20", "ddd13")  # I can obtain the number portion using: gsub("[^[:digit:]]", "", my.data)  # However, I cannot obtaining the character portion using: gsub("[:digit:]", "", my.data) 

How can I obtain the character portion? I am using R version 2.14.1 on a Windows 7 64-bit machine.

Answer 1

Since none of the previous answers use tidyr::separate here it goes:

library(tidyr)  df <- data.frame(mycol = c("APPLE348744", "BANANA77845", "OATS2647892", "EGG98586456"))  df %>%   separate(mycol,             into = c("text", "num"),             sep = "(?<=[A-Za-z])(?=[0-9])"            ) 

Answer 2

For your regex you have to use:

gsub("[[:digit:]]","",my.data) 

The [:digit:] character class only makes sense inside a set of [].