[R] reshape (a better way)
Thomas Lumley
tlumley at u.washington.edu
Wed Jan 26 21:08:46 CET 2005
On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Jean Eid wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am using the NLSY79 data (longitudinal data from the Bureau of labour
> stats in the US). The extractor exctracts this data in a "wide" format and
> I need to reshape it into a long format.
>
> What I am doing right now is to do it in chuncks for each and evry
> variable that is varying and then I merge the data together. This is
> taking a long time. my question is:
>
> How do I specify that there are multiple variables that are varying in
> reshape. Is there a way to do this?
Yes. The help page says
varying: names of sets of variables in the wide format that correspond
to single variables in long format ('time-varying'). A list
of vectors (or optionally a matrix for 'direction="wide"').
See below for more details and options.
That is, you can use something like
varying=list(c("foo1","foo2","foo3"),
c("bar1","bar2","bar3"),
c("baz1","baz2","baz3")),
v.names=c("foo","bar","baz")
-thomas
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