[R] dplyr - add/expand rows

[David Winsemius]

> On Nov 25, 2017, at 11:18 AM, Hutchinson, David (EC) <david.hutchinson at canada.ca> wrote:
> 
> I have a returned tibble of station operational record similar to the following:
> 
>> data.collection
> # A tibble: 5 x 4
>  STATION_NUMBER YEAR_FROM YEAR_TO RECORD
>           <chr>     <int>   <int>  <chr>
> 1        07EA001      1960    1960    QMS
> 2        07EA001      1961    1970    QMC
> 3        07EA001      1971    1971    QMM
> 4        07EA001      1972    1976    QMC
> 5        07EA001      1977    1983    QRC
> 
> I would like to reshape this to one operational record (row) per year per station. Something like:
> 
> 07EA001              1960      QMS
> 07EA001              1961      QMC
> 07EA001              1962      QMC
> 07EA001              1963      QMC
> ...
> 07EA001              1971      QMM
> 
> Can this be done in dplyr easily?

Probably, yes. This looks like a feasible plan might be to "fill-in" the gaps with a last observation carried forward value within categories of station number. The na.locf function in package zoo is very handy for some of these tasks. Or.... Perhaps merging this data with a skeleton data object with station numbers and a `seq`-built vectors for the range of years.  Why don't you post a data example with sufficient complexity to represent the problem? Perhaps:

 dput( head( data.collection, 20) )

It's clear that the first 5 lines are not sufficient since there's only one station. It's kind of a pain to try to construct tibble objects from their print output representations. And posting code to build examples is a specific suggestion in the Posting Guide.

-- 
David
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> David
> 
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> 
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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA

'Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.'   -Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law