Question

I need to Convert Column Values into Row Names using R.

For example to convert format1 into format2

var<-c("Id", "Name", "Score", "Id", "Score", "Id", "Name")
num<-c(1, "Tom", 4, 2, 7, 3, "Jim")
format1<-data.frame(var, num)

format1

    var num
1    Id   1
2  Name Tom
3 Score   4
4    Id   2
5 Score   7
6    Id   3
7  Name Jim

Be careful, there are missing values in the format1,and that’s the challenge, I guess.

Id<-c(1, 2, 3)
Name<-c("Tom", NA, "Jim")
Score<-c(4, 7, NA)
format2<-data.frame(Id, Name, Score)

format2

  Id Name Score
1  1  Tom     4
2  2 <NA>     7
3  3  Jim    NA

# How to convert format1 into format2?

I may not articulate in the exact way, however, you can refer to the toy data i give above.

I know a litter bit about reshape and reshape2, however, I failed in converting the data format using both of them.

Answer 1

format1$ID <- cumsum(format1$var == "Id")
format2 <- reshape(format1, idvar = "ID",timevar = "var", direction = "wide")[-1]
names(format2) <- gsub("num.", "", names(format2)
#   Id Name Score
# 1  1  Tom     4
# 4  2 <NA>     7
# 6  3  Jim  <NA>

Alternatively, if you’d like to skip the gsub() step, you could directly specify the output column names via the varying argument:

reshape(format1, idvar = "ID",timevar = "var", direction = "wide",
        varying = list(c("Id", "Name", "Score")))[-1]