Convert data from long format to wide format with multiple measure columns

Question

I am having trouble figuring out the most elegant and flexible way to switch data from long format to wide format when I have more than one measure variable I want to bring

Answer 1

The pivot_wider() function is tidyr's 2nd generation approach (released in tidyr 1.0.0).

library(magrittr); requireNamespace("tidyr");

my.df %>%
  tidyr::pivot_wider(
    names_from  = c(TIME), # Can accommodate more variables, if needed.
    values_from = c(X, Y)
  )

Result:

# A tibble: 3 x 11
  ID      X_1   X_2   X_3   X_4   X_5   Y_1   Y_2   Y_3   Y_4   Y_5
            
1 A         1     4     7    10    13    16    19    22    25    28
2 B         2     5     8    11    14    17    20    23    26    29
3 C         3     6     9    12    15    18    21    24    27    30

This is probably preferable to the previous tidyr approach (that uses a combination of gather() and spread()).

More capabilities are described in the pivoting vignette. This example is particularly concise because your desired specifications match the defaults of the id_cols and names_sep.