Split colon comma but ignore brackets in R?

Question

I have a data frame, and I want to split the strings in the Mem column by commas and colons. Here's my example:

df <- data.frame(ID=c("AM", "UA", "AS"),
                 Mem = c("WRR(World Happiness Report Index,WHRI)(Cs):1470,Country(%):60.2,UAM(The Star Spangled Banner,TSSB)(s):1380,City(%):69.7,TSSB/Cs(%):93.88,Note:pass",
                         "WRR(World Happiness Report Index,WHRI)(Cs):2280,Country(%):96.2,UAM(The Star Spangled Banner,TSSB)(s):2010,City(%):107.5,TSSB/Cs(%):88.16,Note:pass",
                         "WRR(World Happiness Report Index,WHRI)(Cs):3170,Country(%):101.6,UAM(The Star Spangled Banner,TSSB)(s):2950,City(%):95.5,TSSB/Cs(%):93.06,Note:pass"))

I want to split the strings in the Mem column by colon and comma. The result should be:

    ID  WRR(Happiness Report Index,HRI)(Cs)  Country(%)  UAM(The Star Spangled Banner,TSSB)(s)  City(%)  TSSB/Cs(%)  Note
1:  AM  1470  60.2  1380   69.7  93.88  pass
2:  UA  2280  96.2  2010  107.5  88.16  pass
3:  AS  3170 101.6  2950   95.5  93.06  pass

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

The pattern ":[^,]+,*" can separate the variable names from its values. It means:

• A :;
• Folowed by any number of (+) characters, except commas ([^,]);
• Then, perhaps (*), a comma ,;

We can then save these names on a variable with:

variables <- str_split_1(df$Mem[1], ":[^,]+,*") %>% head(-1)

Obs: the pattern ends up creating an empty string at the end, hence the head(-1).

Then, to get the values, we want the rest of the string. We can do that by removing every element of variables from it. I don't know if there's already a function that does this, but here is a custom one:

str_remove_multiple <- function(x, patterns){
  for(i in patterns) x <- str_remove_all(x, fixed(i))
  x
}

After "cleaning" the Mem variable, we can split it by the remaining ",", and save each value to a new column based on variables:

df %>%
  mutate(Mem = str_remove_list(Mem, c(variables, ":"))) %>%
  separate(Mem, into = variables, sep = ",") %>%
  mutate(across(-c(ID, Note), as.numeric))

Result:

  ID WRR(World Happiness Report Index,WHRI)(Cs) Country(%) UAM(The Star Spangled Banner,TSSB)(s) City(%) TSSB/Cs(%) Note
1 AM                                       1470       60.2                                  1380    69.7      93.88 pass
2 UA                                       2280       96.2                                  2010   107.5      88.16 pass
3 AS                                       3170      101.6                                  2950    95.5      93.06 pass

Answer 2

Can this help?:

dt = setDT(tstrsplit(df$Mem, "([^0-9.]+:)", keep=2:7, type.convert=TRUE))
setnames(dt, unlist(strsplit(df$Mem[1], "(:[^,]+,)|(:pass$)")))

   WRR(World Happiness Report Index,WHRI)(Cs) Country(%) UAM(The Star Spangled Banner,TSSB)(s) City(%) TSSB/Cs(%)   Note
                                        <int>      <num>                                 <int>   <num>      <num> <char>
1:                                       1470       60.2                                  1380    69.7      93.88   pass
2:                                       2280       96.2                                  2010   107.5      88.16   pass
3:                                       3170      101.6                                  2950    95.5      93.06   pass