Reformatting data with a pattern

Question

I have a large dataset with mix of number and alphabets. Just an small example:

sex <- c("M", "F", "F", "M", "M")
 ind <- c("I1", "I2", "I3", "I4", "C")
M1 <- c("ab", "bb", "ac", "ad", "dd")
M2 <- c(12, 22, 23, 24, 25)
M3 <- c("AT", "AG", "AC", "GG", "TC")
 M4 <- c(22, 23, 24, 14, 24)
mydf <- data.frame(sex, ind, M1, M2, M3, M4)
mydf
  sex ind M1 M2 M3 M4
1   M  I1 ab 12 AT 22
2   F  I2 bb 22 AG 23
3   F  I3 ac 23 AC 24
4   M  I4 ad 24 GG 14
5   M   C dd 25 TC 24

I want to introduce a "/" marks between two characters in columns M1......Mn (end of the file) so that the resulting data frame look like:

       sex ind M1 M2 M3 M4
    1   M  I1 a/b 1/2 A/T 2/2
    2   F  I2 b/b 2/2 A/G 2/3
    3   F  I3 a/c 2/3  A/C 2/4
    4   M  I4 a/d 2/4 G/G 1/4
    5   M   C d/d 2/5 T/C 2/4

Sorry I was clueless how to proceed ...your help appreciated ...

Answer 1

One liner:

> data.frame(lapply(mydf, function(x) sub("(.)(.)", "\\1/\\2", x)))
  sex ind  M1  M2  M3  M4
1   M I/1 a/b 1/2 A/T 2/2
2   F I/2 b/b 2/2 A/G 2/3
3   F I/3 a/c 2/3 A/C 2/4
4   M I/4 a/d 2/4 G/G 1/4
5   M   C d/d 2/5 T/C 2/4

Answer 2

All of the cryptic power of R gives you this:

• splitInsert splits a column at each letter using strsplit and recombines it with paste. This is wrapped in sapply to vectorise the function.
• I then use lapply to apply splitInsert over columns 3:6 of your data.frame, and data.frame to combine it with the two columns that you don't want modified.
• Note that splitInsert is fully general - it will work for text strings of any length, and you can use any new character of choice to recombine the split elements.

The code:

splitInsert <- function(x, split="", new="/"){
  sapply(x, function(y)
    paste(
      strsplit(as.character(y), split=split)[[1]], 
      collapse=new)
         )
}

data.frame(mydf[, 1:2], lapply(mydf[, 3:ncol(mydf)], splitInsert))

The results:

  sex ind  M1  M2  M3  M4
1   M  I1 a/b 1/2 A/T 2/2
2   F  I2 b/b 2/2 A/G 2/3
3   F  I3 a/c 2/3 A/C 2/4
4   M  I4 a/d 2/4 G/G 1/4
5   M   C d/d 2/5 T/C 2/4

Answer 3

This seems to work.

m1 <- substr(mydf$M1, start=1, stop=1)
m2 <- substr(mydf$M1, start=2, stop=2)
paste(m1, m2, sep="/")

Output

[1] "a/b" "b/b" "a/c" "a/d" "d/d"