Splitting a dataframe string column into multiple different columns

A very direct way is to just use read.table on your character vector:

> read.table(text = text, sep = ".", colClasses = "character")
   V1 V2  V3  V4
1   F US CLE V13
2   F US CA6 U13
3   F US CA6 U13
4   F US CA6 U13
5   F US CA6 U13
6   F US CA6 U13
7   F US CA6 U13
8   F US CA6 U13
9   F US  DL U13
10  F US  DL U13
11  F US  DL U13
12  F US  DL Z13
13  F US  DL Z13

colClasses needs to be specified, otherwise F gets converted to FALSE (which is something I need to fix in "splitstackshape", otherwise I would have recommended that :) )

---

Update (> a year later)...

Alternatively, you can use my cSplit function, like this:

cSplit(as.data.table(text), "text", ".")
#     text_1 text_2 text_3 text_4
#  1:      F     US    CLE    V13
#  2:      F     US    CA6    U13
#  3:      F     US    CA6    U13
#  4:      F     US    CA6    U13
#  5:      F     US    CA6    U13
#  6:      F     US    CA6    U13
#  7:      F     US    CA6    U13
#  8:      F     US    CA6    U13
#  9:      F     US     DL    U13
# 10:      F     US     DL    U13
# 11:      F     US     DL    U13
# 12:      F     US     DL    Z13
# 13:      F     US     DL    Z13

Or, separate from "tidyr", like this:

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)

as.data.frame(text) %>% separate(text, into = paste("V", 1:4, sep = "_"))
#    V_1 V_2 V_3 V_4
# 1    F  US CLE V13
# 2    F  US CA6 U13
# 3    F  US CA6 U13
# 4    F  US CA6 U13
# 5    F  US CA6 U13
# 6    F  US CA6 U13
# 7    F  US CA6 U13
# 8    F  US CA6 U13
# 9    F  US  DL U13
# 10   F  US  DL U13
# 11   F  US  DL U13
# 12   F  US  DL Z13
# 13   F  US  DL Z13

Is this what you are trying to do?

# Our data
text <- c("F.US.CLE.V13", "F.US.CA6.U13", "F.US.CA6.U13", "F.US.CA6.U13", 
"F.US.CA6.U13", "F.US.CA6.U13", "F.US.CA6.U13", "F.US.CA6.U13", 
"F.US.DL.U13", "F.US.DL.U13", "F.US.DL.U13", "F.US.DL.Z13", "F.US.DL.Z13"
)

#  Split into individual elements by the '.' character
#  Remember to escape it, because '.' by itself matches any single character
elems <- unlist( strsplit( text , "\\." ) )

#  We know the dataframe should have 4 columns, so make a matrix
m <- matrix( elems , ncol = 4 , byrow = TRUE )

#  Coerce to data.frame - head() is just to illustrate the top portion
head( as.data.frame( m ) )
#  V1 V2  V3  V4
#1  F US CLE V13
#2  F US CA6 U13
#3  F US CA6 U13
#4  F US CA6 U13
#5  F US CA6 U13
#6  F US CA6 U13