Dividing a column into multiple ones-CodePudding

I have a long list that looks something like this:

Sample 1 
1        
2        
3  
Sample 2  
4
5
6
Sample 3
7
8
9

And I would like to turn it into this:

Sample 1 Sample 2  Sample 3
   1        4         7  
   2        5         8 
   3        6         9

I'm guessing the solution would be to possibly grep "Sample" and somehow move everything that's under it into a new column, but I cannot figure out how to do that (especially without any packages). Any help would be appreciated.

CodePudding user response：

assuming the samples size is the same, transform list to matrix

list <- list('Sample 1', 
         '1',
         '2',
         '3',
         'Sample 2',  
         '4',
         '5',
         '6',
         'Sample 3',
         '7',
         '8',
         '9')

mat <- matrix(list,nrow = 4)
colnames(mat) <- mat[1,] # first row as names
df <- as.data.frame(mat[-1,]) # remove names form first row & convert to data.frame

out

  Sample 1 Sample 2 Sample 3
1        1        4        7
2        2        5        8
3        3        6        9

CodePudding user response：

Assuming that the pattern is repeated an equal number of times, an option would be to split the df up into equal parts, into a list, and then bind the list into columns:

library(rlist)
n=4
nr=nrow(dat)
list.cbind(split(dat, rep(1:ceiling(nr/n), each=n, length.out=nr)))

       1.V1     2.V1     3.V1
1: Sample 1 Sample 2 Sample 3
2:        1        4        7
3:        2        5        8
4:        3        6        9

dat = fread('Sample 1 
1        
2        
3  
Sample 2  
4
5
6
Sample 3
7
8
9    ', header=F)