On Apr 6, 2012, at 9:09 AM, John D. Muccigrosso wrote: > I have some data files in which some fields have multiple values. For example > > first last sex major > John Smith M ANTH > Jane Doe F HIST,BIOL > > What's the best R-like way to handle these data (Jane's major in my example), > so that I can do things like summarize the other fields by them (e.g., sex by > major)? > > Right now I'm processing the files (in excel since they're spreadsheets) by > duplicating lines with two values in the major field, eliminating one value > per row. I suspect there's a nifty R way to do this.
I've gotten a few responses, for which I'm grateful, but either I don't quite see how they answer my question, or I didn't phrase my question well, both of which are equally possible. :-) So, given the data as above, let's call it "students", I have no problem turning it into: first last sex major John Smith M ANTH Jane Doe F HIST Jane Doe F BIOL What I then do with this is things like table(students$sex, students$major) So, three steps: 1. Get data with multiple values per field. 2. Turn it into a data frame with only one value per field (by duplicating lines). 3. Do things like table(). I'd like to be able to skip #2. Thanks. John Muccigrosso ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
