title: R - Splitting a column text into 2 columns without delimiter
body: <p>I need to manipulate the following data frame (data) so that the PATCH_CODE column is split into 2 resulting columns where the 1st column contains the letter of the string and the 2nd column contains the number as in the 2nd example dataframe below.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong> PATCH_CODE is not always 2 letters, occasional cases have a single letter in which case I need to force a 1 into the resulting code column.</p>
  
  <p>initial data frame: <code>head(data,4)</code></p>
  
  <pre><code>PATCH_CODE    TERR        PC1  
      A1       MENS_10  0.8629186  
      A3       MENS_10 -0.2703238 
      B1       MENS_10  0.9516067  
      B2       MENS_10 -0.1722446
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>resulting data frame:</p>
  
  <pre><code>PATCH        CODE    TERR        PC1  
     A            1     MENS_10     0.8629186  
     A            3     MENS_10    -0.2703238 
     B            1     MENS_10     0.9516067  
     B            2     MENS_10    -0.1722446
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have seen examples of how to accomplish this when the column to be split has an identifiable text delimiter such as a comma by using <code>colsplit</code> in <code>reshape</code> but I have failed to find a solution for a structure like mine. Is this possible?</p>
  
  <p>output of str(data)</p>
  
  <pre><code>'data.frame':   240 obs. of  3 variables:
   $ PATCH_CODE: Factor w/ 42 levels "A","A1","A2",..: 2 3 4 7 8 12 13 16 17 18 ...
   $ TERR      : Factor w/ 19 levels "MENS_10","MENS_14",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
   $ PC1       : num  0.548 1.228 0.273 5.548 3.853 ...
  </code></pre>