Make column levels into new columns R

Question

I have a data table[1000+, 4].

One of the columns has 5 levels and I want to make these 5 levels into 5 new columns.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

We extract the levels from the column of interest ('ColN'), convert to list and assign that to five 'new' columns.

df1[paste0("new", 1:5)] <- as.list(levels(df1$ColN))
head(df1,2)
#    ColN Col2 Col3 new1 new2 new3 new4 new5
#1    C    7    a    A    B    C    D    E
#2    A    4    b    A    B    C    D    E
levels(df1$ColN)
#[1] "A" "B" "C" "D" "E"

data

set.seed(48)
df1 <- data.frame(ColN= sample(LETTERS[1:5], 10, 
   replace=TRUE), Col2= sample(10), Col3= letters[1:10])