Expand ranges defined by “from” and “to” columns

Question

I have a data frame containing \"name\" of U.S. Presidents, the years when they start and end in office, (\"from\" and \"to\" columns

Answer 1

You can use the plyr package:

library(plyr)
ddply(presidents, "name", summarise, year = seq(from, to))
#              name year
# 1    Barack Obama 2009
# 2    Barack Obama 2010
# 3    Barack Obama 2011
# 4    Barack Obama 2012
# 5    Bill Clinton 1993
# 6    Bill Clinton 1994
# [...]

and if it is important that the data be sorted by year, you can use the arrange function:

df <- ddply(presidents, "name", summarise, year = seq(from, to))
arrange(df, df$year)
#              name year
# 1    Bill Clinton 1993
# 2    Bill Clinton 1994
# 3    Bill Clinton 1995
# [...]
# 21   Barack Obama 2011
# 22   Barack Obama 2012

Edit 1: Following's @edgester's "Update 1", a more appropriate approach is to use adply to account for presidents with non-consecutive terms:

adply(foo, 1, summarise, year = seq(from, to))[c("name", "year")]