I have the following dataframe with a string column and I want to extract T,N,M,G,L status (and so on..) for each observation into separate new columns including their respective prefix and suffix. I have tried the grep() and strsplit function but the resulting columns have differing number of rows due to NA values and it doesn't seem to work. I'm not an expert in coding and I'd really appreciate your support for a working script. Thanks in advance.

Code should be placed in three backticks as shown below

df <- c("cT1b;cN1a;cM0;G3", "pT1a;pN0;cM0;G1;L0;V0;Pn0;R0", "cT3;cN0;M0", "rpT1b;rcN0;M0;L0;V0;Pn0;R0", "pT1b;pN0;L0;V0;Pn0;R0", "cT1;cN0; MX", "cT4d;cN1a;M0")

tmp<- trimws(strsplit(df, ";"))
if(length(grep("T", tmp)>0)){ df$G=tmp[grep("G", tmp)]; }

This support site is intended to help people with questions about Bioconductor software rather than general R string manipulation. You should direct your question to either R-help (r-help@r-project.org) or maybe stackoverflow.com or biostars.com.

When you do so, you should try to rephrase your question. I don't know what T,N,M,G,L status is, and you shouldn't assume that anybody else will. You should instead say exactly what you are trying to do. There are lower case p and c in your strings. Do they matter? What should the output for your data look like? You should show an example of the input you have and the hoped for output.