I have a question regarding the best way to transform data into a wide format and hope this is asked in an understandable way. Consider the following code:

day <- c("mon", "tues", "wed", "thur")
hours <- c(2, 4, 6, 8)
cost <- c(100, 200, 300, 400)

df <- data.frame(day, hours, cost)

In this dataframe I have made, the table is in 4×3 format. I would like to transform this to 2×4 format. Consider the code below to see the format I would like to transform to:

type <- c("hours", "cost")
mon <- c(2, 100)
tues <- c(4, 200)
wed <- c(6, 300)
thur <- c(8, 400)

df1 <- data.frame(type, mon, tues, wed, thur)

I have tried using pivot wider but I am guessing I am somewhat off the mark here. Any solutions would be greatly appreciated

>Solution :

Try with data.table::transpose

data.table::transpose(df, make.names = 'day', keep.names = 'type')

-output

   type mon tues wed thur
1 hours   2    4   6    8
2  cost 100  200 300  400

---

With tidyverse, do a pivot_longer, then reshape to wide with pivot_wider

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
df %>% 
 pivot_longer(cols = -day, names_to = 'type') %>% 
 pivot_wider(names_from = day, values_from = value)

-output

# A tibble: 2 × 5
  type    mon  tues   wed  thur
  <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 hours     2     4     6     8
2 cost    100   200   300   400