before = data.frame(attr = c(1,30,4,6), type=c('foo_and_bar','foo_and_bar_2'))
  attr          type
1    1   foo_and_bar
2   30 foo_and_bar_2
3    4   foo_and_bar
4    6 foo_and_bar_2

and use split() on the column "type" from above to get something like this:

attr type_1 type_2
1    1    foo    bar
2   30    foo  bar_2
3    4    foo    bar
4    6    foo  bar_2

I came up with something unbelievably complex involving some form of apply that worked, but I've since misplaced that. It seemed far too complicated to be the best way. I can use strsplit as below, but then unclear how to get that back into 2 columns in the data frame.

> strsplit(as.character(before$type),'_and_')
[[1]]
[1] "foo" "bar"

[[2]]
[1] "foo"   "bar_2"

[[3]]
[1] "foo" "bar"

[[4]]
[1] "foo"   "bar_2"

Thanks for any pointers. I've not quite groked R lists just yet.

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)

before <- data.frame(
  attr = c(1, 30 ,4 ,6 ), 
  type = c('foo_and_bar', 'foo_and_bar_2')
)

before %>%
  separate(type, c("foo", "bar"), "_and_")

##   attr foo   bar
## 1    1 foo   bar
## 2   30 foo bar_2
## 3    4 foo   bar
## 4    6 foo bar_2

before <- data.frame(attr = c(1,30,4,6), type=c('foo_and_bar','foo_and_bar_2'))  
out <- strsplit(as.character(before$type),'_and_') 
do.call(rbind, out)

     [,1]  [,2]   
[1,] "foo" "bar"  
[2,] "foo" "bar_2"
[3,] "foo" "bar"  
[4,] "foo" "bar_2"​

And to combine:

data.frame(before$attr, do.call(rbind, out))

library(splitstackshape)
cSplit(before, "type", "_and_")
#    attr type_1 type_2
# 1:    1    foo    bar
# 2:   30    foo  bar_2
# 3:    4    foo    bar
# 4:    6    foo  bar_2

base but probably slow:

n <- 1
for(i in strsplit(as.character(before$type),'_and_')){
     before[n, 'type_1'] <- i[[1]]
     before[n, 'type_2'] <- i[[2]]
     n <- n + 1
}

##   attr          type type_1 type_2
## 1    1   foo_and_bar    foo    bar
## 2   30 foo_and_bar_2    foo  bar_2
## 3    4   foo_and_bar    foo    bar
## 4    6 foo_and_bar_2    foo  bar_2

This question is pretty old but I'll add the solution I found the be the simplest at present.

library(reshape2)
before = data.frame(attr = c(1,30,4,6), type=c('foo_and_bar','foo_and_bar_2'))
newColNames <- c("type1", "type2")
newCols <- colsplit(before$type, "_and_", newColNames)
after <- cbind(before, newCols)
after$type <- NULL
after