How to reshape data from long to wide format? R [Answered]

Problem:

I’m having trouble rearranging the following data frame:

set.seed(45)
dat1 <- data.frame(
    name = rep(c("firstName", "secondName"), each=4),
    numbers = rep(1:4, 2),
    value = rnorm(8)
    )

dat1
       name  numbers      value
1  firstName       1  0.3407997
2  firstName       2 -0.7033403
3  firstName       3 -0.3795377
4  firstName       4 -0.7460474
5 secondName       1 -0.8981073
6 secondName       2 -0.3347941
7 secondName       3 -0.5013782
8 secondName       4 -0.1745357

I want to reshape it so that each unique “name” variable is a rowname, with the “values” as observations along that row and the “numbers” as colnames. Sort of like this:

     name          1          2          3         4
1  firstName  0.3407997 -0.7033403 -0.3795377 -0.7460474
5 secondName -0.8981073 -0.3347941 -0.5013782 -0.1745357

I’ve looked at melt and cast and a few other things, but none seem to do the job.

How to reshape data from long to wide format? Answer #1:

It’s a very simple and one-liner answer.

Using reshape function:

reshape(dat1, idvar = "name", timevar = "numbers", direction = "wide")

How to reshape data from long to wide format? Answer #2:

You can do this with the reshape() function, or with the melt() / cast() functions in the reshape package. For the second option, example code is

library(reshape)
cast(dat1, name ~ numbers)

Or using reshape2

library(reshape2)
dcast(dat1, name ~ numbers)

How to reshape data from long to wide format? Answer #3:

With the devel version of tidyr ‘0.8.3.9000’, there is pivot_wider and pivot_longer which is generalized to do the reshaping (long -> wide, wide -> long, respectively) from 1 to multiple columns. Using the OP’s data

-single column long -> wide

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
dat1 %>% 
    pivot_wider(names_from = numbers, values_from = value)
# A tibble: 2 x 5
#  name          `1`    `2`    `3`    `4`
#  <fct>       <dbl>  <dbl>  <dbl>  <dbl>
#1 firstName   0.341 -0.703 -0.380 -0.746
#2 secondName -0.898 -0.335 -0.501 -0.175

-> created another column for showing the functionality

dat1 %>% 
    mutate(value2 = value * 2) %>% 
    pivot_wider(names_from = numbers, values_from = c("value", "value2"))
# A tibble: 2 x 9
#  name       value_1 value_2 value_3 value_4 value2_1 value2_2 value2_3 value2_4
#  <fct>        <dbl>   <dbl>   <dbl>   <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>
#1 firstName    0.341  -0.703  -0.380  -0.746    0.682   -1.41    -0.759   -1.49 
#2 secondName  -0.898  -0.335  -0.501  -0.175   -1.80    -0.670   -1.00    -0.349

How to reshape data from long to wide format? Answer #4-5:

#4: Using your example dataframe, we could:

xtabs(value ~ name + numbers, data = dat1)

#5:

Other two options:

Base package:

df <- unstack(dat1, form = value ~ numbers)
rownames(df) <- unique(dat1$name)
df

sqldf package:

library(sqldf)
sqldf('SELECT name,
      MAX(CASE WHEN numbers = 1 THEN value ELSE NULL END) x1, 
      MAX(CASE WHEN numbers = 2 THEN value ELSE NULL END) x2,
      MAX(CASE WHEN numbers = 3 THEN value ELSE NULL END) x3,
      MAX(CASE WHEN numbers = 4 THEN value ELSE NULL END) x4
      FROM dat1
      GROUP BY name')