Split string with repeated delimiters

Question

I have a string in R in the following form:

example <- c("namei1 namej1, surname1, name2, surnamei2 surnamej2, name3, surname3")

And I wish to obtain two columns:

namei1 namej1   | surname1
name2           | surnamei2 surnamej2
name3           | surname3

I try using string split:

example <- c("namei1 namej1, surname1, name2, surnamei2 surnamej2, name3, surname3")
pattern <- "\\,+[[:space:]]"
str_split(example, pattern)

But, I get stuck from here…

Answer 1

read.csv(text = gsub("([^,]+,[^,]+),", "\\1\n", example), 
         header = FALSE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

#              V1                   V2
# 1 namei1 namej1             surname1
# 2         name2  surnamei2 surnamej2
# 3         name3             surname3

Answer 2

We can split the string at , followed by zero or more spaces (\\s*), then create a grouping variable based on the occurance of 'name' string and split the vector (v1) into a list of vectors, rbind thelistelements and convert it to adata.frame`

v1 <- strsplit(example, ",\\s*")[[1]]
setNames(do.call(rbind.data.frame, split(v1, cumsum(grepl('\\bname',
       v1)))), paste0("V", 1:2))
#       V1                  V2
#1 namei1 namej1            surname1
#2         name2 surnamei2 surnamej2
#3         name3            surname3

---

Or another option is scan and convert it to a two column matrix

as.data.frame( matrix(trimws(scan(text = example, sep=",",
      what = "", quiet = TRUE)), byrow = TRUE, ncol = 2))
#       V1                  V2
#1 namei1 namej1            surname1
#2         name2 surnamei2 surnamej2
#3         name3            surname3

---

Or another option is gsub where we replace the , followed by space and 'name' string with \n and 'name' and use that in. read.csv to split based on the delimiter ,

read.csv(text = gsub(", name", "\nname", example), header= FALSE)
#         V1                   V2
#1 namei1 namej1             surname1
#2         name2  surnamei2 surnamej2
#3         name3             surname3