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pivot_longer() "lengthens" data, increasing the number of rows and decreasing the number of columns. The inverse transformation is `tidyr::pivot_wider()]

Learn more in vignette("pivot", "tidyr").

While most functionality is identical there are some differences to pivot_longer() on local data frames:

  • the output is sorted differently/not explicitly,

  • the coercion of mixed column types is left to the database,

  • values_ptypes NOT supported.

Note that build_longer_spec() and pivot_longer_spec() do not work with remote tables.

Usage

# S3 method for tbl_lazy
pivot_longer(
  data,
  cols,
  ...,
  cols_vary,
  names_to = "name",
  names_prefix = NULL,
  names_sep = NULL,
  names_pattern = NULL,
  names_ptypes = NULL,
  names_transform = NULL,
  names_repair = "check_unique",
  values_to = "value",
  values_drop_na = FALSE,
  values_ptypes,
  values_transform = NULL
)

Arguments

data

A data frame to pivot.

cols

Columns to pivot into longer format.

...

Additional arguments passed on to methods.

cols_vary

Unsupported; included for compatibility with the generic.

names_to

A string specifying the name of the column to create from the data stored in the column names of data.

names_prefix

A regular expression used to remove matching text from the start of each variable name.

names_sep, names_pattern

If names_to contains multiple values, these arguments control how the column name is broken up.

names_ptypes

A list of column name-prototype pairs.

names_transform, values_transform

A list of column name-function pairs.

names_repair

What happens if the output has invalid column names?

values_to

A string specifying the name of the column to create from the data stored in cell values. If names_to is a character containing the special .value sentinel, this value will be ignored, and the name of the value column will be derived from part of the existing column names.

values_drop_na

If TRUE, will drop rows that contain only NAs in the value_to column.

values_ptypes

Not supported.

Details

The SQL translation basically works as follows:

  1. split the specification by its key columns i.e. by variables crammed into the column names.

  2. for each part in the split specification transmute() data into the following columns

  • id columns i.e. columns that are not pivotted

  • key columns

  • value columns i.e. columns that are pivotted

  1. combine all the parts with union_all()

Examples

# See vignette("pivot") for examples and explanation

# Simplest case where column names are character data
memdb_frame(
  id = c("a", "b"),
  x = 1:2,
  y = 3:4
) %>%
  tidyr::pivot_longer(-id)
#> # Source:   SQL [4 x 3]
#> # Database: sqlite 3.42.0 [:memory:]
#>   id    name  value
#>   <chr> <chr> <int>
#> 1 a     x         1
#> 2 b     x         2
#> 3 a     y         3
#> 4 b     y         4