tell us

When we saw pillar::glimpse() in the list we thought that it was something that we hadn’t used before, BUT… turns out, the pillar package (which contains the glimpse() function is part of the tidyverse.

The glimpse() function is SUPER useful when you want to get a quick look at the variables in your dataframe and what kind of data R thinks they are.

We use it a lot when we are adding new variables or changing the kind of data of a particular variable, just as a sanity check to make sure that R has done what we asked it to.

show us

install and load packages

You get access to the glimpse() function when you load the tidyverse (the pillar package is auto-loaded in the background)

library(tidyverse)
## ── Attaching packages ─────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.3.0 ──
## ✓ ggplot2 3.3.3     ✓ purrr   0.3.4
## ✓ tibble  3.1.1     ✓ dplyr   1.0.6
## ✓ tidyr   1.1.3     ✓ stringr 1.4.0
## ✓ readr   1.4.0     ✓ forcats 0.5.1
## ── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
## x dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## x dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
library(palmerpenguins)

get some data

penguins <- penguins

use the function

You can glimpse ALL the variables…

glimpse(penguins)
## Rows: 344
## Columns: 8
## $ species           <fct> Adelie, Adelie, Adelie, Adelie, Adelie, Adelie, Adel…
## $ island            <fct> Torgersen, Torgersen, Torgersen, Torgersen, Torgerse…
## $ bill_length_mm    <dbl> 39.1, 39.5, 40.3, NA, 36.7, 39.3, 38.9, 39.2, 34.1, …
## $ bill_depth_mm     <dbl> 18.7, 17.4, 18.0, NA, 19.3, 20.6, 17.8, 19.6, 18.1, …
## $ flipper_length_mm <int> 181, 186, 195, NA, 193, 190, 181, 195, 193, 190, 186…
## $ body_mass_g       <int> 3750, 3800, 3250, NA, 3450, 3650, 3625, 4675, 3475, …
## $ sex               <fct> male, female, female, NA, female, male, female, male…
## $ year              <int> 2007, 2007, 2007, 2007, 2007, 2007, 2007, 2007, 2007…

… or if you have TOO MANY VARIABLES, you can pick just one.

glimpse(penguins$island)
##  Factor w/ 3 levels "Biscoe","Dream",..: 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 ...

tips and tricks

As always, the tidyverse vignettes are super useful, the vignette for pillar is here.