Question

I am trying to cut one row

x = [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12]

into multiple rows of equal length so that

y(row1) = [1 2 3 4

y(row2) = 5 6 7 8

y(row3) = 9 10 11 12]

I know I can achieve this using a combination of rbind and cbind, but the dataset I am trying to apply this to is much larger than the example, so I am looking for a way to do it more quickly and automatically. I tried cut and cut2 but those didnt work either

jelle

Answer 1

The function matrix() is your friend here:

> matrix(1:12, nrow = 3, byrow = TRUE)
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
[1,]    1    2    3    4
[2,]    5    6    7    8
[3,]    9   10   11   12

Note the optional parameter, byrow. The default is FALSE and will fill the matrix by columns, setting it to true in this case gets the data arranged in the order that you described.Just something to be careful about, since R won’t throw an error if you fill by column, but your data won’t be in the right format!