tidyr is new package that makes it easy to “tidy” your data. Tidy data is data that’s easy to work with: it’s easy to munge (with dplyr), visualise (with ggplot2 or ggvis) and model (with the R’s hundreds of modelling packages). The two most important properties of tidy data are:

Arranging your data in this way makes it easier to work with because you have a consistent way of referring to variables (as column names) and observations (as row indicies). When use tidy data and tidy tools, you spend less time worrying about how to feed the output from one function into the input of another, and more time struggling with your questions about the data.

To tidy messy data, you first identify the variables in your dataset, then use the tools provided by tidyr to move them into columns. tidyr provides three main functions for tidying your messy data: gather(), separate() and spread().

gather() takes multiple columns, and gathers them into key-value pairs: it makes “wide” data longer. Other names for gather include melt (reshape2), pivot (spreadsheets) and fold (databases). Here’s an example how you might use gather() on a made-up dataset. In this experiment we’ve given three people two different drugs and recorded their heart rate:

messy <- data.frame(
  name = c("Wilbur", "Petunia", "Gregory"),
  a = c(67, 80, 64),
  b = c(56, 90, 50)
)
messy
#>      name  a  b
#> 1  Wilbur 67 56
#> 2 Petunia 80 90
#> 3 Gregory 64 50

We have three variables (name, drug and heartrate), but only name is currently in a column. We use gather() to gather the a and b columns into key-value pairs of drug and heartrate:

messy %>%
  gather(drug, heartrate, a:b)
#>      name drug heartrate
#> 1  Wilbur    a        67
#> 2 Petunia    a        80
#> 3 Gregory    a        64
#> 4  Wilbur    b        56
#> 5 Petunia    b        90
#> 6 Gregory    b        50

Sometimes two variables are jammed into the same column. separate() allows you to tease them apart. Take this example, modified from this stackoverflow question. We have some measurements of how much time people spend on their phones, measured at two locations (work and home), at two times. Each person has been randomly assigned to either a control or treatment.

set.seed(10)
messy <- data.frame(
  id = 1:4,
  trt = sample(rep(c('control', 'treatment'), each = 2)),
  work.T1 = runif(4),
  home.T1 = runif(4),
  work.T2 = runif(4),
  home.T2 = runif(4)
)

To tidy this data, we first use gather() to turn columns work.T1, home.T1, work.T2 and home.T2 into a key-value pair of key and time. (Only the first eight rows are shown to save space).

tidier <- messy %>%
  gather(key, time, -id, -trt)
tidier %>% head(8)
#>   id       trt     key    time
#> 1  1 treatment work.T1 0.08514
#> 2  2   control work.T1 0.22544
#> 3  3 treatment work.T1 0.27453
#> 4  4   control work.T1 0.27231
#> 5  1 treatment home.T1 0.61583
#> 6  2   control home.T1 0.42967
#> 7  3 treatment home.T1 0.65166
#> 8  4   control home.T1 0.56774

Next we use separate() to split the key into location and time, using a regular expression.

tidy <- tidier %>%
  separate(key, into = c("location", "time"), sep = "\\.") 
tidy %>% head(8)
#>   id       trt location time    time
#> 1  1 treatment     work   T1 0.08514
#> 2  2   control     work   T1 0.22544
#> 3  3 treatment     work   T1 0.27453
#> 4  4   control     work   T1 0.27231
#> 5  1 treatment     home   T1 0.61583
#> 6  2   control     home   T1 0.42967
#> 7  3 treatment     home   T1 0.65166
#> 8  4   control     home   T1 0.56774

The last tool, spread(), takes two columns (a key-value pair) and spreads in to multiple columns, making “long” data wider. Spread is known by other names in other places: it’s cast in reshape2, unpivot in spreadsheets and unfold in databases. spread() is used when you have variables that form rows instead of columns. You need spread() less frequently than gather() or separate() so if you want to learn more, check out the documentation and the demos.

You can learn more about the underlying principles in my tidy data paper. To see more examples of data tidying, read the vignette, vignette("tidy-data"), or check out the demos, demo(package = "tidyr"). There are already a number of great stackoverflow answers that use tidyr.

Just as reshape2 did less than reshape, tidyr does less than reshape2. It’s designed specifically for tidying data, not the general reshaping that reshape2 does, or the general aggregation that reshape did. In particular, built-in methods only work for data frames, and tidyr provides no margins or aggregation. This makes each function in tidyr simpler: each function does one thing well. To do more complicated operations you can string together multiple simple tidyr and dplyr functions with %>%.

Track development progress at http://github.com/hadley/tidyr, report bugs at http://github.com/hadley/tidyr/issues and get help with data manipulation challenges at https://groups.google.com/group/manipulatr. If you ask a question specifically about tidyr on stackoverflow, please tag it with tidyr and I’ll make sure to read it.