How to control new variables' names after tidyr's spread?
I know some years has passed since this question was originally asked, but for posterity I want to also highlight the sep argument of spread. When not NULL, it will be used as separator between the key name and values:
mydf %>%
spread(key = year, value = value, sep = "")
# id year2012 year2013
#1 1 0.15608322 0.6886531
#2 2 0.04598124 0.0792947
#3 3 0.16835445 0.1744542
This is not exactly as wanted in the question, but sufficient for my purposes. See ?spread.
Update with tidyr 1.0.0: tidyr 1.0.0 have now introduced pivot_wider (and pivot_longer) which allows for more control in this respect with the arguments names_sep and names_prefix. So now the call would be:
mydf %>%
pivot_wider(names_from = year, values_from = value,
names_prefix = "year")
# # A tibble: 3 x 3
# id year2012 year2013
# <int> <dbl> <dbl>
# 1 1 0.347 0.388
# 2 2 0.565 0.924
# 3 3 0.406 0.296
To get exactly what was originally wanted (prefixing "y" only) you can of course now get that directly by simply having names_prefix = "y".
The names_sep is used in case you gather over multiple columns as demonstrated below where I have added quarters to the data:
# Add quarters to data
mydf2 <- data.frame(
id = rep(1:3, each = 8),
year = rep(rep(c(2012, 2013), each = 4), 3),
quarter = rep(c("Q1","Q2","Q3","Q4"), 3),
value = runif(24)
)
head(mydf2)
# id year quarter value
# 1 1 2012 Q1 0.8651470
# 2 1 2012 Q2 0.3944423
# 3 1 2012 Q3 0.4580580
# 4 1 2012 Q4 0.2902604
# 5 1 2013 Q1 0.4751588
# 6 1 2013 Q2 0.6851755
mydf2 %>%
pivot_wider(names_from = c(year, quarter), values_from = value,
names_sep = "_", names_prefix = "y")
# # A tibble: 3 x 9
# id y2012_Q1 y2012_Q2 y2012_Q3 y2012_Q4 y2013_Q1 y2013_Q2 y2013_Q3 y2013_Q4
# <int> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
# 1 1 0.865 0.394 0.458 0.290 0.475 0.685 0.213 0.920
# 2 2 0.566 0.614 0.509 0.0515 0.974 0.916 0.681 0.509
# 3 3 0.968 0.615 0.670 0.748 0.723 0.996 0.247 0.449
You can use backticks for column names starting with numbers and filter should work as expected
mydf %>%
spread(year, value) %>%
filter(`2012` > 0.5)
# id 2012 2013
#1 3 0.8453762 0.3346603
Or another option would be using unite to join two columns to a single columnn after creating a second column 'year1' with string 'y'.
mydf %>%
mutate(year1='y') %>%
unite(yearN, year1, year) %>%
spread(yearN, value) %>%
filter(y_2012 > 0.5)
# id y_2012 y_2013
#1 3 0.8453762 0.3346603
Even we can change the 'year' column within mutate by using paste
mydf %>%
mutate(year=paste('y', year, sep="_")) %>%
spread(year, value) %>%
filter(y_2012 > 0.5)
Another option is to use the setNames() function as the next thing in the pipe:
mydf %>%
spread(mydf, year, value) %>%
setNames( c("id", "y2012", "y2013") ) %>%
filter(y2012 > 0.5)
The only problem using setNames is that you have to know exactly what your columns will be when you spread() them. Most of the time, that's not a problem, particularly if you're working semi-interactively.
But if you're missing a key/value pair in your original data, there's a chance it won't show up as a column, and you can end up naming your columns incorrectly without even knowing it. Granted, setNames() will throw an error if the number of names doesn't match the number of columns, so you've got a bit of error checking built in.
Still, the convenience of using setNames() has outweighed the risk more often than not for me.