Pivot Wider with two values

byMR

September 7, 2022

Well, let me explain what im trying to achieve.

I have a data.frame just like this:

And im trying to use pivot_wider to keep one ID per row and spread the other columns like this:

Im strugling with pivot_wider, values_from argument… Any toughts?

Heres my example df

df<- data.frame(ID = c(1,1,2,2,3,3),
           category = c("A","B","A","C","A","C"),
           date = c(Sys.Date(), Sys.Date()-10, Sys.Date(), 
                    Sys.Date()-10, Sys.Date(), Sys.Date()-10))

>Solution :

Create a row sequence by ‘ID’, use the sequence column as names_from and values_from as ‘category’ and ‘date’ in the pivot_wider

library(dplyr)
library(data.table)
library(tidyr)
df %>%
   mutate(rn = rowid(ID)) %>%
   pivot_wider(names_from = rn, values_from = c(category, date), names_sep = "")

-output

# A tibble: 3 × 5
     ID category1 category2 date1      date2     
  <dbl> <chr>     <chr>     <date>     <date>    
1     1 A         B         2022-09-06 2022-08-27
2     2 A         C         2022-09-06 2022-08-27
3     3 A         C         2022-09-06 2022-08-27

Or using row_number() after grouping to create the sequence column

df %>%
   group_by(ID) %>%
   mutate(rn = row_number()) %>%
   ungroup %>%
   pivot_wider(names_from = rn, values_from = c(category, date), names_sep = "")