Question

I have a text variable and a grouping variable. I’d like to collapse the text variable into one string per row (combine) by factor. So as long as the group column says m I want to group the text together and so on. I provided a sample data set before and after. I am writing this for a package and have thus far avoided all reliance on other packages except for wordcloudand would like to keep it this way.

I suspect rle may be useful with cumsum but haven’t been able to figure this one out.

Thank you in advance.

What the data looks like

                                 text group
1       Computer is fun. Not too fun.     m
2               No its not, its dumb.     m
3              How can we be certain?     f
4                    There is no way.     m
5                     I distrust you.     m
6         What are you talking about?     f
7       Shall we move on?  Good then.     f
8 Im hungry.  Lets eat.  You already?     m

What I’d like the data to look like

                                                       text group
1       Computer is fun. Not too fun. No its not, its dumb.     m
2                                    How can we be certain?     f
3                          There is no way. I distrust you.     m
4 What are you talking about? Shall we move on?  Good then.     f
5                       Im hungry.  Lets eat.  You already?     m

The Data

dat <- structure(list(text = c("Computer is fun. Not too fun.", "No its not, its dumb.", 
"How can we be certain?", "There is no way.", "I distrust you.", 
"What are you talking about?", "Shall we move on?  Good then.", 
"Im hungry.  Lets eat.  You already?"), group = structure(c(2L, 
2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L), .Label = c("f", "m"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("text", 
"group"), row.names = c(NA, 8L), class = "data.frame")

EDIT: I found I can add unique column for each run of the group variable with:

x <- rle(as.character(dat$group))[[1]]
dat$new <- as.factor(rep(1:length(x), x))

Yielding:

                                 text group new
1       Computer is fun. Not too fun.     m   1
2               No its not, its dumb.     m   1
3              How can we be certain?     f   2
4                    There is no way.     m   3
5                     I distrust you.     m   3
6         What are you talking about?     f   4
7       Shall we move on?  Good then.     f   4
8 Im hungry.  Lets eat.  You already?     m   5

Answer 1

This makes use of rle to create an id to group the sentences on. It uses tapply along with paste to bring the output together

## Your example data
dat <- structure(list(text = c("Computer is fun. Not too fun.", "No its not, its dumb.", 
"How can we be certain?", "There is no way.", "I distrust you.", 
"What are you talking about?", "Shall we move on?  Good then.", 
"Im hungry.  Lets eat.  You already?"), group = structure(c(2L, 
2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L), .Label = c("f", "m"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("text", 
"group"), row.names = c(NA, 8L), class = "data.frame")


# Needed for later
k <- rle(as.numeric(dat$group))
# Create a grouping vector
id <- rep(seq_along(k$len), k$len)
# Combine the text in the desired manner
out <- tapply(dat$text, id, paste, collapse = " ")
# Bring it together into a data frame
answer <- data.frame(text = out, group = levels(dat$group)[k$val])