Replacing ^ and | sybmbols in a matrix

I have the following table:

column1  column2
1        aaa^bbb
2        aaa^bbb|ccc^ddd

I would like to have a output file as follows:

column1   column2     column3
1         aaa         bbb
2         aaa         bbb
3         ccc         ddd

Could you mind to let me know if there are smart way of doing this?

Update:

I was trying to do two things;

For ^, I want to separate the context to the column 2 and column 3.

For |, I want to separate it to the next row, but keeping the same number in column1 (the column1 is the same for row 2 and 3. Sorry that I make a mistake here.

To rewrite, inpu开发者_如何学编程t is as follows:

column1  column2 
x        aaa^bbb 
y        aaa^bbb|ccc^ddd 

Output is as follows:

column1   column2     column3 
x         aaa         bbb 
y         aaa         bbb 
y         ccc         ddd 

---

The easiest way to do what you are after, is just use strsplit. For example,

> x = c("aaa^bbb", "aaa^bbb|ccc^ddd")
> ## Split the vector on ^ OR |.
> ## Since ^ and | are special characters
> ## we need to escape them: \\^ and \\|
> ## Split by column.
> new_x = unlist(strsplit(x, "\\|"))
> ## Split by row
> new_x = unlist(strsplit(new_x, "\\^"))
> new_x
 [1] "aaa" "bbb" "aaa" "bbb" "ccc" "ddd"

> ## Change the vector back into a matrix
> dim(new_x) = c(2,3)
> ## Transpose to get correct shape
> t(new_x)
     [,1]  [,2] 
[1,] "aaa" "bbb"
[2,] "aaa" "bbb"
[3,] "ccc" "ddd"

You could probably combine the splitting step, but I don't have enough knowledge to your data format to be confident that it will always work.