-1

in every example I have seen so far for reading csv files in R, the variables are in columns and the observations (individuals) are in rows. In a introductory statistics course I am taking there is an example table where the (many) variables are in rows and the (few) observations are in columns. Is there a way to read such a table so that you get a dataframe in the usual "orientation"?

Hans
  • 145
  • 9
  • Use `t()` after reading the data – nghauran May 25 '19 at 15:40
  • It's hard to do anything but guess without seeing your data or code or what you've been able to do so far. [See here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example) on making a reproducible example – camille May 25 '19 at 21:02

1 Answers1

0

Here is a solution that uses the tidyverse. First, we gather the data into narrow format tidy data, then we spread it back to wide format, setting the first column as a key for the gathered observations by excluding it from gather().

We'll demonstrate the technique with state level summary data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

I created a table of population data for four states, where the states (observations) are in columns, and the variables are listed in rows of the table.

enter image description here

To make the example reproducible, we entered the data into Excel and saved it as a comma separated values file, which we assign to a vector in R and read with read.csv(). 

textFile <- "Variable,Georgia,California,Alaska,Alabama
population2018Estimate,10519475,39557045,737438,4887871
population2010EstimatedBase,9688709,37254523,710249,4780138
pctChange2010to2018,8.6,6.2,3.8,2.3
population2010Census,8676653,37253956,710231,4779736"

# load tidyverse libraries 
library(tidyr)
library(dplyr)
# first gather to narrow format then spread back to wide format
data %>% 
     gather(.,state,value,-Variable) %>% spread(Variable,value)

...and the results:

       state pctChange2010to2018 population2010Census
1    Alabama                 2.3              4779736
2     Alaska                 3.8               710231
3 California                 6.2             37253956
4    Georgia                 8.6              8676653
  population2010EstimatedBase population2018Estimate
1                     4780138                4887871
2                      710249                 737438
3                    37254523               39557045
4                     9688709               10519475
Len Greski
  • 10,505
  • 2
  • 22
  • 33