[R] aggregate text column by a few rows

[Phil Spector]

Richard -
   Yes, you certainly can use aggregate to acheive what you want:

> aggregate(a$hobby,a['name'],paste,collapse=' ')
   name               x
1  Tom fishing reading
2 Mary reading running
3 John         boating

 					- Phil Spector
 					 Statistical Computing Facility
 					 Department of Statistics
 					 UC Berkeley
 					 spector at stat.berkeley.edu


On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Tan, Richard wrote:

> Hi, R function aggregate can only take summary stats functions, can I
> aggregate text columns?  For example, for the dataframe below,
>
>
>
>> a <- rbind(data.frame(id=1, name='Tom',
> hobby='fishing'),data.frame(id=1, name='Tom',
> hobby='reading'),data.frame(id=2, name='Mary',
> hobby='reading'),data.frame(id=3, name='John',
> hobby='boating'),data.frame(id=2, name='Mary', hobby='running'))
>
>> a
>
>  id name   hobby
>
> 1  1  Tom fishing
>
> 2  1  Tom reading
>
> 3  2 Mary reading
>
> 4  3 John boating
>
> 5  2 Mary running
>
>
>
>
>
> I want output as
>
>> b
>
> id name hobbies
>
> 1 Tom    fishing reading
>
> 2 Mary reading running
>
> 3 John boating
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Richard
>
>
>
>
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>
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