Tidying datasets with multiple sections/headers at variable positions

Question

Context

I am trying to read in and tidy an excel file with multiple headers/sections placed at variable positions. The content of these headers need to

Answer 1

Assuming you have a finite list of measures (diesel, electric, etc), you can make a list to check against. Any value of col1 not in that set of measures is presumably a city. Extract those (note that it's currently a factor, so I used as.character), fill down, and remove any heading rows.

library(dplyr)

meas <- c("Diesel", "Gasoline", "LPG", "Electric")

df %>%
  mutate(city = ifelse(!col1 %in% meas, as.character(col1), NA)) %>%
  tidyr::fill(city) %>%
  filter(col1 != city)
#>       col1 col2    city
#> 1   Diesel   80 Seattle
#> 2 Gasoline   NA Seattle
#> 3      LPG   10 Seattle
#> 4 Electric   10 Seattle
#> 5   Diesel   65  Boston
#> 6 Gasoline   25  Boston
#> 7 Electric   10  Boston