Selecting Text from an R string to create a new object - string

Question

I'm relatively new to R, and I'm currently stuck.
I have observations that are made up of legal articles, fe:
BIV:III,XXVIII.1(b);CIV:2.
So I splitted them resulting in a string listing each observation and the legal articles used. This looks like:
ArtAGr list of 400230
chr[1:2] "BIV:III,XXVIII.1(b)" "CIV:2"
chr[1:1] "ILA:2.3(b)"
chr[1:3] "BIV:IB.3(d)" "CIV:7,9" "ILA:VII.1"
The BIV and CIV would need to become my new variables. However, the observations vary, so some observations include both BIV and CIV, while others include other legal articles like ILA:II.3(b)
Now, I would like to create a dataframe from these guys, so I can group all the observations in a column for each major article.
Eventually, the perfect dataframe should look like:
Dispute BIV CIV ILA
1 III, XXVIII.1(b) 2 NA
2 NA NA II.3(b)
3 IV.3(d) 7,9 VII.1
4 II NA NA
So, I will need to create a new object grouping all observations who contain a text like BIV, and a O or N/A for those observations that do not use this legal article. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks a lot!
Sven

Answer 1

Here's an approach:
# a vector of character strings (not the splitted ones)
vec <- c("BIV:III,XXVIII.1(b);CIV:2",
"ILA:II.3(b)",
"BIV:IB.3(d);CIV:7,9;ILA:VII.1")
# split strings
s <- strsplit(vec, "[;:]")
# target words
tar <- c("BIV", "CIV", "ILA")
# create data frame
setNames(as.data.frame(do.call(rbind, lapply(s, function(x)
replace(rep(NA_character_, length(tar)),
match(x[c(TRUE, FALSE)], tar), x[c(FALSE, TRUE)])))), tar)
The result:
BIV CIV ILA
1 III,XXVIII.1(b) 2 <NA>
2 <NA> <NA> II.3(b)
3 IB.3(d) 7,9 VII.1