Here is an option using regexec
and regmatches
to pull out the patterns:
matches <- regmatches(df$a, regexec("^.*?_.*?_([0-9]+)_([[:alnum:]]+)$", df$a))
df[c("match.1", "match.2")] <- t(sapply(matches, `[`, -1)) # first result for each match is full regular expression so need to drop that.
Produces:
a match.1 match.2
1 HELP_PLEASE_4_ME 4 ME
2 SOS_WOW_3_Y34OU 3 Y34OU
This will break if any rows don't have the expected structure, but I think that is what you want to happen (i.e. be alerted that your data is not what you think it is). strsplit
based approaches will require additional checking to ensure that your data is what you think it is.
And the data:
df <- data.frame(a=c("HELP_PLEASE_4_ME", "SOS_WOW_3_Y34OU"), stringsAsFactors=F)