Repeat rows of a data.frame

There is a lovely vectorized solution that repeats only certain rows n-times each, possible for example by adding an ntimes column to your data frame:

  A B   C ntimes
1 j i 100      2
2 K P 101      4
3 Z Z 102      1

Method:

df <- data.frame(A=c("j","K","Z"), B=c("i","P","Z"), C=c(100,101,102), ntimes=c(2,4,1))
df <- as.data.frame(lapply(df, rep, df$ntimes))

Result:

  A B   C ntimes
1 Z Z 102      1
2 j i 100      2
3 j i 100      2
4 K P 101      4
5 K P 101      4
6 K P 101      4
7 K P 101      4

This is very similar to Josh O'Brien and Mark Miller's method:

df[rep(seq_len(nrow(df)), df$ntimes),]

However, that method appears quite a bit slower:

df <- data.frame(A=c("j","K","Z"), B=c("i","P","Z"), C=c(100,101,102), ntimes=c(2000,3000,4000))

microbenchmark::microbenchmark(
  df[rep(seq_len(nrow(df)), df$ntimes),],
  as.data.frame(lapply(df, rep, df$ntimes)),
  times = 10
)

Result:

Unit: microseconds
                                      expr      min       lq      mean   median       uq      max neval
   df[rep(seq_len(nrow(df)), df$ntimes), ] 3563.113 3586.873 3683.7790 3613.702 3657.063 4326.757    10
 as.data.frame(lapply(df, rep, df$ntimes))  625.552  654.638  676.4067  668.094  681.929  799.893    10

df <- data.frame(a = 1:2, b = letters[1:2]) 
df[rep(seq_len(nrow(df)), each = 2), ]

A clean dplyr solution, taken from here

library(dplyr)
df <- tibble(x = 1:2, y = c("a", "b"))
df %>% slice(rep(1:n(), each = 2))