1 column contains headers and data, how to make it into multiple - r

Question

I'm trying to take a Word doc that has data not in a table, and make it into a table. There are hundreds of identical word docs and I would like to write a script that could take the data and make it into a table.
My first idea is to convert it all into one column, and then I can somehow pull the column headers out and organize the data underneath it.
Word file: https://github.com/cstaulbee/Operation-WordDoc/blob/master/Sanitized_sampe.docx
library(docxtractr)
filenames <- list.files(".", pattern="*.docx", full.names=TRUE)
docx.files <- lapply(filenames, function(file) read_docx(file))
idx <- 1
docx.tables <- lapply(docx.files, function(file) {
ifelse(dir.exists("Contents"), {
unlink("Contents", recursive=T, force=T)
dir.create("Contents")
}, {
dir.create("Contents")
})
filename <- filenames[idx]
idx <- idx + 1
tbl <- docx_extract_tbl(file, 1)
file.copy(filename, "Contents\\word.zip", overwrite=T)
unzip("Contents\\word.zip", exdir='Contents')
x <- xml2::read_xml("Contents\\word\\document.xml")
nodes <- xml2::xml_find_all(x, "w:body/w:p/w:r/w:t")
data.date <- paste(xml2::xml_text(nodes, trim=T), collapse="::")
word_df <- strsplit(gsub("[:]{1,}", ":", txt), ":")
return(
list(
date=data.date
)
)
})
word_df <- strsplit(gsub("[:]{1,}", ":", docx.tables), ":")
This converts the word doc to a zip file, then reads it as an XML. It pulls out the info that isn't in tables, and then puts it all into a list that can then be manipulated.
I wanted to know if anyone knows of a way to take this column and make it into a few columns based on the data. For example, Date, Time in, Pilot, and Assistants will appear 3 or so times in the column, but I want each of those to be their own column, with the data between them and the next column header to be the data that makes up the rows.
So basically it looks like this:
df_col
Date
2/
2/16
Pilot
John, Mark
Assistants
Alfred, James
But I want it to look like this
Date_col Pilot_col Assistants_col
2/22/16 John, Mark Alfred, James
Unless someone has an idea of a better way of doing this.

Answer 1

You can use officer to scrap your docx document:
library(officer)
doc <- read_docx(path = "Sanitized_sampe.docx")
docx_summary(doc)
The last step would be to regexp column text when content_type=="paragraph".