I need some help conditionally sorting/switching data based on a factor variable. I'm not sure if it's a typical use case I just can't formulate properly enough for a search engine to show me a solution or if it is that niche but I haven't found anything yet.
I currently have a dataframe like this:
id group a1 a2 a3 a4 b1 b2 b3 b4
1 1 2 6 6 3 4 4 6 4
2 2 5 2 2 2 2 5 2 3
3 1 6 3 3 1 3 6 4 1
4 1 4 8 4 2 7 8 8 9
5 2 3 1 1 4 2 1 1 7
For context this is from a psychological experiment where people went through two variations of a task and the order of those conditions was determined by the experimental group they were assigned to. The columns represent different measurements from different trials and are currently grouped together for the same variable and in chronological order, meaning a1,a2,a3,a4 are essentially the same variable at consecutive time points, same with b1,b2,b3,b4.
I want to split them up for the different conditions so regardless of which group (=which order of tasks) someone went through, data from one condition should come first in the dataframe and columns should still be grouped together for the same variables and in chronological order within that condition. It should essentially look like this:
id group c1a1 c1a2 c2a1 c2a2 c1b1 c1b2 c2b1 c2b2
1 1 2 6 6 3 4 4 6 4
2 2 2 2 5 2 2 3 2 5
3 1 6 3 3 1 3 6 4 1
4 1 4 8 4 2 7 8 8 9
5 2 1 4 3 1 1 7 2 1
So essentially for group 1 everything stays the same since they happened to go through the conditions in the same order that I want to have in the new dataframe while for group 2 values are being switched where the originally second half of values for each variable is put in front of the originally first one.
I hope I formulated the problem in a way, people can understand it.
My real dataset is a bit more complicated it has 180 columns minus id and group so 178. I have 13 variables some of which were measured over two conditions with 5 trials for each of those and some which have those 5 trials for each of the 2 main condition but which also have 2 adittional measurements for each condition where the order was determined by the same group variable.
(We essentially asked participants to do the task again in two certain ways, which allowed us to see if they were capable of doing them like that if they wanted to under the circumstences of both main conditions).
So there are an adittional 4 columns for some variables which need to be treated seperately. It should look like this when transformed (x and y are the 2 extra tasks where only b was measured once):
id group c1a1 c1a2 c2a1 c2a2 c1b1 c1b2 c1bx c1by c2b1 c2b2 c2bx c2by
1 1 2 6 6 3 4 4 3 7 6 4 4 2
2 2 2 2 5 2 2 3 4 3 2 5 2 2
3 1 6 3 3 1 3 6 2 2 4 1 1 1
4 1 4 8 4 2 7 8 1 1 8 9 5 8
5 2 1 4 3 1 1 7 8 9 2 1 3 4
What I want to say with this is, I need a pretty general solution.
I already tried formulating a function for creation of two seperate datasets for the groups and then merging them by id but got stuck with the automatic creation and naming of columns which I can't seem to wrap my head around. dplyr is currently loaded and used for some other transformations but since I'm not really good with it, I need to ask for your help regarding a solution with or without it. I'm still pretty new to R and this is for my bachelor thesis.
Thanks in advance!