What is tidyr gather() in R?
Overview
The tidyr package in R helps create tidy data, providing different build-in functions used for data cleaning.
gather() is used to gather multiple columns and collapse them into key-value pairs. It is invoked from the tidyr package with different argument values, as shown below.
In the graphical illustration above, we've gathered the cinnamon_1, cinnamon_2, and nutmeg_3 columns into key and values pairs. We created a new column,
Syntax
gather(data, key, value, ….)
Parameters
It takes the following argument values.
data: The name of the DataFrame.key: The name of the key column that is to be created.value: The name of the value column that is to be created.…: This specifies the column from which the key-value pair will be gathered.
Return value
It returns merged information of the same type as data (an argument value).
Explanation
Let's look at an example of the gather() function below:
# demo program to show the working of gather()# importing tidyr librarylibrary("tidyr")# creating a DataFramedf <- data.frame(players=c('Amber', 'Paisley', 'Roxanne', 'Scarlett'),Year_2012=c(12, 5, 7, 19),Year_2013=c(15, 25, NA, 29))cat("Before Gather() Called\n")#viewing data frameprint(df)cat("\nAfter Gather() Called\n")# gathering the data from columns 2 and 3gather(df, key="Year", value="Matches Played", 2:3)
- Line 5: We create a DataFrame that contains three columns and five observations.
- Line 10: We print DataFrame before the
gather()function is called. - Line 13: This line of code shows how the
gather()function will combine the players as the key and Year_2020, Year_2022 as values. Finally, we print the new DataFrame on the console.
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