How to get the second sub element of every element in a list

To select the second element of each list item:

R> sapply(df$suf, "[[", 2)
[1] "00" "01" "02" "00" "01" "02" "21" "01" "03"

An alternative approach using regular expressions:

df$pre <- sub("^([A-Z]+)[0-9]+", "\\1", df$lab)
df$suf <- sub("^[A-Z]+([0-9]+)", "\\1", df$lab)