Warning: number of columns of result is not a multiple of vector length (arg 1)

Question

I am trying to split a column. my data frame (menuD) is like

Column1
1|3|4|5
4|5|6|7

I wanted to split the numbers in column1 so I did this.

menuD <- data.frame (do.call('rbind', strsplit(as.character(myCmenu$myFile.menudata), '|', fixed = TRUE)))

I got the expected result which is like this

col1 | col2 | col3 | col4
  1  |  3   |  4   | 5
  4  |  5   |  6   | 7

But I got this warning message from R

> Warning message:
In rbind(c("", "164200", "", "167", "108", "112", "116", "120"),  :
  number of columns of result is not a multiple of vector length (arg 1)

I'd like to know, did this effect my data? is all the data separated properly?

Answer 1

Based on the example provided, either cSplit

library(splitstackshape)
cSplit(menuD, "Column1", "|")
#   Column1_1 Column1_2 Column1_3 Column1_4
#1:         1         3         4         5
#2:         4         5         6         7

---

Or separate from tidyr

library(tidyr)
separate(menuD, Column1, into = paste0("col", 1:4))

---

Or read.table/read.csv can be used.

read.table(text=menuD$Column1, sep="|", fill=TRUE, header=FALSE)

But, the warning in the OP's post indicates that there might be elements in the "Column1" with less number of |. In that case, the cSplit or the last option should work.