title: Difficult Problem in R. Split Character String of Dataset, but Maintain Information in other Columns
body: <p>I am using R. Take the dataset I created below for an example. I want to be able to separate <code>ip</code> by <code>"."</code> while at the same time keeping the original row information in <code>color</code> and <code>status</code>.  I recognize that this will create a longer dataset, where entries for <code>color</code> and <code>status</code> will repeat themselves.</p>
  
  <pre><code>a &lt;- data.frame(cbind(color=c("yellow","red","blue","red"),
         status=c("no","yes","yes","no"),
         ip=c("162.131.58.26","2.131.58.16","2.2.58.10","162.131.58.17")))
  </code></pre>