Simple Stacking of Two Columns

Hi,

You were on the right track using stack(), but you just pass the entire data frame as a single object, not the separate columns:
stack(NamesWide)
? values ? ind
1 ? ?Tom Name1
2 ? Dick Name1
3 ?Larry Name2
4 ?Curly Name2

Note that stack also returns the index (second column of 'ind' values), which tells you which column in the source data frame the stacked values originated from.

Thus, if you just want the actual data:
stack(NamesWide)$values
[1] "Tom" ? "Dick" ?"Larry" "Curly"

returns a vector, or:
stack(NamesWide)[, 1, drop = FALSE]
? values
1 ? ?Tom
2 ? Dick
3 ?Larry
4 ?Curly

which returns a data frame with a single column named 'values'.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz

Hi R-Helpers,

Sorry to bother you, but I have a simple task that I can't figure out how to do.

For example, I have some names in two columns

NamesWide<-data.frame(Name1=c("Tom","Dick"),Name2=c("Larry","Curly"))

and I simply want to get a single column
NamesLong<-data.frame(Names=c("Tom","Dick","Larry","Curly"))
NamesLong
Names
1 Tom
2 Dick
3 Larry
4 Curly

Stack produces an error
NamesLong<-stack(NamesWide$Name1,NamesWide$Names2)
Error in if (drop) { : argument is of length zero

So does bind_rows
NamesLong<-dplyr::bind_rows(NamesWide$Name1,NamesWide$Name2)
Error in `dplyr::bind_rows()`:
! Argument 1 must be a data frame or a named atomic vector.
Run `rlang::last_error()` to see where the error occurred.

I tried making separate dataframes to get around the error in bind_rows but it puts the data in two different columns
Name1<-data.frame(c("Tom","Dick"))
Name2<-data.frame(c("Larry","Curly"))
NamesLong<-dplyr::bind_rows(Name1,Name2)
NamesLong
c..Tom....Dick.. c..Larry....Curly..
1 Tom  
2 Dick  
3 Larry
4 Curly

gather makes no change to the data
NamesLong<-gather(NamesWide,Name1,Name2)
NamesLong
Name1 Name2
1 Tom Larry
2 Dick Curly

Please help me solve what should be a very simple problem.

Thanks,
John Sparks

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Simple Stacking of Two Columns

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