Unlist a data frame by rows, not columns

Gio Circo picture Gio Circo · Aug 13, 2015 · Viewed 7.2k times · Source

A relatively simple question, but the answer seems to have eluded me. Currently, I have a data frame which looks similar to this:

0   0   0   1   1
0   1   0   1   1
2   1   1   0   3

I'm trying to turn this into a single line of data, by rows. I used the unlist function, and it did what I wanted, but gave them to me by columns. It gave me this:

0,0,2,0,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,0,1,1,3

but what I want is this:

0,0,0,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,2,1,1,0,3

I apologize if this seems like a silly question, but I'm still a novice with R. Any help (or referrals to functions which might help me process this) would be greatly appreciated.

Answer

akrun picture akrun · Aug 13, 2015

We can take the transpose (t) of the dataset and then use c to get a vector output

 c(t(df1))
 #[1] 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 2 1 1 0 3

By doing transpose, we convert the 'data.frame' to 'matrix'. In both data.frame or matrix, unlist/c operations happen columnwise. So, transposing swaps the columns for rows and viceversa and we get the expected result.