splitting multiple values in one column into multiple rows R

Question

I have a data frame which for the most part is one observation per row. However, some rows have multiple values:

# A tibble: 3 x 2
          `number`   abilities
             <dbl>       <chr>
1               51       b1261
2               57        d710
3               57 b1301; d550

structure(list(`number` = c(51, 57, 57), abilities = c("b1261", 
"d710", "b1301; d550")), .Names = c("number", "abilities"
), row.names = c(NA, -3L), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"
))

I'd like to get the following:

# A tibble: 3 x 2
          `number`   abilities
             <dbl>       <chr>
1               51       b1261
2               57        d710
3               57        d550
4               57       b1301

It's straight forward enough to split on the ; but I'm not sure how to easily add a new row, especially as abilities might contain more than 2 values.

This is very similar to: R semicolon delimited a column into rows but doesn't need to remove duplicates

Answer 1

There's a function separate_rows in tidyr to do just that:

library(tidyr)
## The ";\\s+" means that the separator is a ";" followed by one or more spaces
separate_rows(df,abilities,sep=";\\s+")
  number abilities
   <dbl>     <chr>
1     51     b1261
2     57      d710
3     57     b1301
4     57      d550