Regular expressions are powerful tools for extracting tables from non-tabular text data. Capturing regular expressions that describe the information to extract from column names can be especially useful when reshaping a data table from wide (few rows with many regularly named columns) to tall (fewer columns with more rows). We present the R package nc (short for named capture), which provides functions for wide-to-tall data reshaping using regular expressions. We describe the main new ideas of nc, and provide detailed comparisons with related R packages (stats, utils, data.table, tidyr, tidyfast, tidyfst, reshape2, cdata).
Supplementary materials are available in addition to this article. It can be downloaded at RJ-2021-029.zip
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For attribution, please cite this work as
Hocking, "The R Journal: Wide-to-tall Data Reshaping Using Regular Expressions and the nc Package", The R Journal, 2021
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2021-029,
author = {Hocking, Toby Dylan},
title = {The R Journal: Wide-to-tall Data Reshaping Using Regular Expressions and the nc Package},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2021},
note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2021-029},
doi = {10.32614/RJ-2021-029},
volume = {13},
issue = {1},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {98-111}
}