Select values from R dataframe column

Question

I'm working on a class project using a Chicago crime data set and R. One of the attributes in the data set is Block which contains partial addresses where the incident occurred. For example:

+--------------------------+
|           Block          |
+--------------------------+
|  45xx N Locust Grove St  |
|   65xx Hawthorne Ave     |
+--------------------------+

The values in Block vary in length but I am wanting to create a new variable with the street type, St, Ave, Blvd, etc. I have tried using the separate function from tidyr.

df <- df %>%
   separate(Block, into = c("partial.address, "type"),
           sep = " ", extra = "merge", fill = "left")

However, this returns the number, 45xx, as the partial.address value and the remaining value is in type. How can I select the street type from the address?

I'm hoping to get something like this as output:

+--------------------------+-------------+
|     partial.address      |     type    |
+--------------------------+-------------+
|  45xx N Locust Grove     |      St     |
|   65xx Hawthorne         |     Ave     |
+--------------------------+-------------+

Ronak Shah · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-04 01:18:00Z

2

You can use extract :

tidyr::extract(df, Block, c("partial.address", "type"), "(.*)(St|Ave)")

#      partial.address  type
#1 45xx N Locust Grove    St
#2      65xx Hawthorne   Ave

Or using stringr :

library(dplyr)
library(stringr)

df %>%
  mutate(type = str_extract(Block, '(St|Ave)'), 
         partial.address = str_remove(Block, type))

You can include more patterns in (St|Ave) if you have more.

If we want to capture the last word of each Block we can use :

df %>%
  mutate(type = str_extract(Block, '\\w+$'), 
         partial.address = str_remove(Block, type))

data

df <- structure(list(Block = c("45xx N Locust Grove St", "65xx Hawthorne Ave"
)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -2L))

edited Jun 4, 2020 at 1:18

answered Jun 4, 2020 at 1:07

Ronak Shah

391k20 gold badges173 silver badges237 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

3 Comments

gernworm Over a year ago

Is there not a way to split on the white space and select the index for the last position to fill the variable type? The data set is 15,000 records and there are several street types.

Ronak Shah Over a year ago

@miguelf88 See updated answer. It selects the last word in each Block.

gernworm Over a year ago

Thanks @RonakShah. Using the str_extract with '\\w+$' worked. I tried using '(St|Ave|Blvd|Rd)' but the column was filled with NA values.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Select values from R dataframe column

1 Answer 1

3 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

3 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related