Sometimes in a survey you have a question of the type, "... please select all that apply". In super awesome survey software, the returned data arrives with a column for each of the options so your software and graphs can easily know about each option's presence of absence. In super awesome survey software that only fails on this one point (like …

R split one column into multiple others

splitcol = function(x, newcols, targetCol) {
    
    # delete commas IN THE STATEMENTS SEPARATED BY COMMAS ROFLMAO
    x[[targetCol]] = sub('tablet, such', 'tablet such', x[[targetCol]])
    x[[targetCol]] = sub('phone, tablet, or', 'phone tablet or', x[[targetCol]])
    
    # check for presence of known examples (newcols[2])
    for (i in newcols) {
        x[[i[1]]] = ifelse(grepl(i[2], x[[targetCol]]), 1, 0)
    }
    
    # check for presence of 'other' strings
    # basically, split target col on ', ' and see if any of the resulting
    # strings DON'T match any of our newcol matches
    match_str <<- paste0(sapply(newcols, function(x) x[-1]), collapse='|')
    targetCol <<- targetCol
    x = adply(x, 1, transform,
              asdf=ifelse(any(!grepl(match_str,
                                     strsplit(get(targetCol), ', ')[[1]])),
                          1, 0))
    
    # rename 'other' column <targetCol.'other'>
    x = rename(x, replace=c('asdf' = paste0(targetCol, ".other")))

    # and we're done
    return(x);
}

# which animals do you love? pick all that apply...
# format for list is c(<newColName>, <patternToMatch>)
animalL = list(c('animalLove.cat', 'love cats'),
               c('animalLove.dog', 'love dogs'),
               c('animalLove.goldfish', 'my goldfish'))
r = splitcol(r, animalL, 'animalLove')