Gather multiple sets of columns

With the recent update to melt.data.table, we can now melt multiple columns. With that, we can do:

require(data.table) ## 1.9.5
melt(setDT(df), id=1:2, measure=patterns("^Q3.2", "^Q3.3"), 
     value.name=c("Q3.2", "Q3.3"), variable.name="loop_number")
 #    id       time loop_number         Q3.2        Q3.3
 # 1:  1 2009-01-01           1 -0.433978480  0.41227209
 # 2:  2 2009-01-02           1 -0.567995351  0.30701144
 # 3:  3 2009-01-03           1 -0.092041353 -0.96024077
 # 4:  4 2009-01-04           1  1.137433487  0.60603396
 # 5:  5 2009-01-05           1 -1.071498263 -0.01655584
 # 6:  6 2009-01-06           1 -0.048376809  0.55889996
 # 7:  7 2009-01-07           1 -0.007312176  0.69872938

You can get the development version from here.

This could be done using reshape. It is possible with dplyr though.

  colnames(df) <- gsub("\\.(.{2})$", "_\\1", colnames(df))
  colnames(df)[2] <- "Date"
  res <- reshape(df, idvar=c("id", "Date"), varying=3:8, direction="long", sep="_")
  row.names(res) <- 1:nrow(res)
  
   head(res)
  #  id       Date time       Q3.2       Q3.3
  #1  1 2009-01-01    1  1.3709584  0.4554501
  #2  2 2009-01-02    1 -0.5646982  0.7048373
  #3  3 2009-01-03    1  0.3631284  1.0351035
  #4  4 2009-01-04    1  0.6328626 -0.6089264
  #5  5 2009-01-05    1  0.4042683  0.5049551
  #6  6 2009-01-06    1 -0.1061245 -1.7170087

Or using dplyr

  library(tidyr)
  library(dplyr)
  colnames(df) <- gsub("\\.(.{2})$", "_\\1", colnames(df))

  df %>%
     gather(loop_number, "Q3", starts_with("Q3")) %>% 
     separate(loop_number,c("L1", "L2"), sep="_") %>% 
     spread(L1, Q3) %>%
     select(-L2) %>%
     head()
  #  id       time       Q3.2       Q3.3
  #1  1 2009-01-01  1.3709584  0.4554501
  #2  1 2009-01-01  1.3048697  0.2059986
  #3  1 2009-01-01 -0.3066386  0.3219253
  #4  2 2009-01-02 -0.5646982  0.7048373
  #5  2 2009-01-02  2.2866454 -0.3610573
  #6  2 2009-01-02 -1.7813084 -0.7838389

Update

With new version of tidyr, we can use pivot_longer to reshape multiple columns. (Using the changed column names from gsub above)

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
df %>% 
    pivot_longer(cols = starts_with("Q3"), 
          names_to = c(".value", "Q3"), names_sep = "_") %>% 
    select(-Q3)
# A tibble: 30 x 4
#      id time         Q3.2    Q3.3
#   <int> <date>      <dbl>   <dbl>
# 1     1 2009-01-01  0.974  1.47  
# 2     1 2009-01-01 -0.849 -0.513 
# 3     1 2009-01-01  0.894  0.0442
# 4     2 2009-01-02  2.04  -0.553 
# 5     2 2009-01-02  0.694  0.0972
# 6     2 2009-01-02 -1.11   1.85  
# 7     3 2009-01-03  0.413  0.733 
# 8     3 2009-01-03 -0.896 -0.271 
#9     3 2009-01-03  0.509 -0.0512
#10     4 2009-01-04  1.81   0.668 
# … with 20 more rows

NOTE: Values are different because there was no set seed in creating the input dataset

This approach seems pretty natural to me:

df %>%
  gather(key, value, -id, -time) %>%
  extract(key, c("question", "loop_number"), "(Q.\\..)\\.(.)") %>%
  spread(question, value)

First gather all question columns, use extract() to separate into question and loop_number, then spread() question back into the columns.

#>    id       time loop_number         Q3.2        Q3.3
#> 1   1 2009-01-01           1  0.142259203 -0.35842736
#> 2   1 2009-01-01           2  0.061034802  0.79354061
#> 3   1 2009-01-01           3 -0.525686204 -0.67456611
#> 4   2 2009-01-02           1 -1.044461185 -1.19662936
#> 5   2 2009-01-02           2  0.393808163  0.42384717