Reshaping multiple sets of measurement columns (wide format) into single columns (long format)

reshape(dat, idvar="ID", direction="long", 
             varying=list(Start=c(2,5,8), End=c(3,6,9), Value=c(4,7,10)),
             v.names = c("DateRangeStart", "DateRangeEnd", "Value") )
#-------------
    ID time DateRangeStart DateRangeEnd Value
1.1  1    1          1/1/90        3/1/90    4.4
1.2  1    2          4/5/91        6/7/91    6.2
1.3  1    3          5/5/95        6/6/96    3.3

(Added the v.names per Josh's suggestion.)

data.table's melt function can melt into multiple columns. Using that, we can simply do:

require(data.table)
melt(setDT(dat), id=1L,
     measure=patterns("Start$", "End$", "^Value"), 
     value.name=c("DateRangeStart", "DateRangeEnd", "Value"))

#    ID variable DateRangeStart DateRangeEnd Value
# 1:  1        1         1/1/90       3/1/90   4.4
# 2:  1        2         4/5/91       6/7/91   6.2
# 3:  1        3         5/5/95       6/6/96   3.3

---

Alternatively, you can also reference the three sets of measure columns by the column position:

melt(setDT(dat), id = 1L, 
     measure = list(c(2,5,8), c(3,6,9), c(4,7,10)), 
     value.name = c("DateRangeStart", "DateRangeEnd", "Value"))

Reshaping from wide to long format with multiple value/measure columns is possible with the function pivot_longer() of the tidyr package since version 1.0.0.

This is superior to the previous tidyr strategy of gather() than spread() (see answer by @AndrewMacDonald), because the attributes are no longer dropped (dates remain dates and numerics remain numerics in the example below).

library("tidyr")
library("magrittr")

a <- structure(list(ID = 1L, 
                    DateRange1Start = structure(7305, class = "Date"), 
                    DateRange1End = structure(7307, class = "Date"), 
                    Value1 = 4.4, 
                    DateRange2Start = structure(7793, class = "Date"),
                    DateRange2End = structure(7856, class = "Date"), 
                    Value2 = 6.2, 
                    DateRange3Start = structure(9255, class = "Date"), 
                    DateRange3End = structure(9653, class = "Date"), 
                    Value3 = 3.3),
               row.names = c(NA, -1L), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"))

pivot_longer() (counterpart: pivot_wider()) works similar to gather(). However, it offers additional functionality such as multiple value columns. With only one value column, all colnames of the wide data set would go into one long column with the name given in names_to. For multiple value columns, names_to may receive multiple new names.

This is easiest if all column names follow a specific pattern like Start_1, End_1, Start_2, etc. Therefore, I renamed the columns in the first step.

(names(a) <- sub("(\\d)(\\w*)", "\\2_\\1", names(a)))
#>  [1] "ID"               "DateRangeStart_1" "DateRangeEnd_1"  
#>  [4] "Value_1"          "DateRangeStart_2" "DateRangeEnd_2"  
#>  [7] "Value_2"          "DateRangeStart_3" "DateRangeEnd_3"  
#> [10] "Value_3"

pivot_longer(a, 
             cols = -ID, 
             names_to = c(".value", "group"),
             # names_prefix = "DateRange",
             names_sep = "_")
#> # A tibble: 3 x 5
#>      ID group DateRangeEnd DateRangeStart Value
#>   <int> <chr> <date>       <date>         <dbl>
#> 1     1 1     1990-01-03   1990-01-01       4.4
#> 2     1 2     1991-07-06   1991-05-04       6.2
#> 3     1 3     1996-06-06   1995-05-05       3.3

Alternatively, the reshape may be done using a pivot spec that offers finer control (see link below):

spec <- a %>%
    build_longer_spec(cols = -ID) %>%
    dplyr::transmute(.name = .name,
                     group = readr::parse_number(name),
                     .value = stringr::str_extract(name, "Start|End|Value"))

pivot_longer(a, spec = spec)

^{Created on 2019-03-26 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)}

See also: https://tidyr.tidyverse.org/articles/pivot.html