18

I currently have:

Country.Name   1995 1996 1997 ... 2013
Country1       
Country2        (numeric data)
Country3

-This format makes it difficult to graph the data for each country, and compare them, since the header columns are individual years

I want:

Year  Country1   Country2   Country3
1995
1996        
1997           (numeric data)
...
2013
lr1116
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2 Answers2

25
df_transpose = t(df_original)

See more: http://www.r-statistics.com/tag/transpose/

saladi
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  • When I transposed the rows and columns, the column names of the new data frame don't appear. R won't let me enter df_transposed$column_name. I get "$ operator is invalid for atomic vectors" – lr1116 Nov 11 '15 at 05:49
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    Can you update your question with some information about your dataframe itself? Try `str(df_original)` – saladi Nov 11 '15 at 07:37
25

Assuming you have this data frame df, see data below. 

  Country.Name 1997 1998 1999 2000
1     Country1    1    1    1    1
2     Country2    2    4    7   10
3     Country3    4    2    1    5

First you have to transpose all data frame except the first column. The result being a matrix that we need to convert to a data frame. Finally, we assign as column names of df2the first column of the original data frame df.

df2 <- data.frame(t(df[-1]))
colnames(df2) <- df[, 1]

Output:

     Country1 Country2 Country3
1997        1        2        4
1998        1        4        2
1999        1        7        1
2000        1       10        5

Data:

df <- structure(list(Country.Name = c("Country1", "Country2", "Country3"
), `1997` = c(1L, 2L, 4L), `1998` = c(1L, 4L, 2L), `1999` = c(1L, 
7L, 1L), `2000` = c(1L, 10L, 5L)), .Names = c("Country.Name", 
"1997", "1998", "1999", "2000"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, 
-3L))
mpalanco
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  • a comment for the beginners like me - you do not need the second line of the code if in the original dataframe you do not have the row numbers – Yuliia Zhaha Feb 13 '21 at 21:25