Reshape in R without aggregation (for example MTurk response strings)

Question

Ordinarily, I\'d use a pretty basic long-to-wide reshape for this, but it seems to be dropping my aggregation variables. The setup is I had a job on mechanical Turk that I perfo

Answer 1

Using plyr:

res = ddply(dat,.(Input.id,Input.State),
            function(x)unlist(as.character(x$Answer.Q1thing)))
setNames(res,c('Id','State','Answer1','Answer2','Answer3'))
  Id State Answer1 Answer2  Answer3
1 134231    NY Myguess Myguess BadGuess
2 134812    CA Another Another  Another

EDIT

In case you have fewer than 3 answers:

res = ddply(dat,.(Input.id,Input.State),
            function(x)
              {
              xx= unlist(as.character(x$Answer.Q1thing))
              if(length(xx)==3)xx
              else c(xx,rep(NA,3-length(xx)))
            })