What is the best way to transpose a data.frame in R and to set one of the columns to be the header for the new transposed table?

Question

What is the best way to transpose a data.frame in R and to set one of the columns to be the header for the new transposed table? I have coded up a way to do this below. As I am

Answer 1

I had a similar problem to this -- I had a variable of factors in a long format and I wanted each factor to be a new column heading; using "unstack" from the stats library did it in one step. If the column you want as a header isn't a factor, "cast" from the reshape library might work.

Answer 2

Well you could do it in 2 steps by using

# Transpose table YOU WANT
fooData.T <- t(fooData[,2:ncol(fooData)])

# Set the column headings from the first column in the original table
colnames(fooData.T) <- fooData[,1] 

The result being a matrix which you're probably aware of, that's due to class issues when transposing. I don't think there will be a single line way to do this given the lack of naming abilities in the transpose step.

Answer 3

Here are my two cents using dplyr for a data.frame that has grouping columns and an id column.

id_transpose <- function(df, id){
  df %>% 
    ungroup() %>% 
    select(where(is.numeric)) %>% 
    t() %>% 
    as_tibble() %>% 
    setNames(., df %>% pull({{id}}))
}