How to transpose a dataframe in tidyverse?

r dataframe transpose tidyr tidyverse

Irakli · Oct 28, 2016 · Viewed 30.1k times · Source

Using basic R, I can transpose a dataframe, say mtcars, which has all columns of the same class:

as.data.frame(t(mtcars))

Or with pipes:

library(magrittr)
mtcars %>% t %>% as.data.frame

How to accomplish the same within tidyr or tidyverse packages?

My attempt below gives:

Error: Duplicate identifiers for rows

library(tidyverse)
mtcars %>% gather(var, value, everything()) %>% spread(var, value)

Answer

Try with add_rownames

add_rownames(mtcars) %>% 
         gather(var, value, -rowname) %>% 
         spread(rowname, value)

In the newer version, rownames_to_column replaces add_rownames

mtcars %>%
   rownames_to_column %>% 
   gather(var, value, -rowname) %>% 
   spread(rowname, value)

In the even newer version, pivot_wider replaces spread:

mtcars %>%
   tibble::rownames_to_column() %>%  
   pivot_longer(-rowname) %>% 
   pivot_wider(names_from=rowname, values_from=value)