Gather multiple date/value columns using tidyr

Question

I have a data set containing (amongst others) multiple columns with dates and corresponding values (repeated measurements). Is there a way to turn this into a long data set

Answer 1

I had the exact same question and data format for a dataset I was working on. Crowdsourced the answer at work. A couple of us came up with a single tidyr and dplyr pipeline solution. Using the same simulated df from original question.

df %>%
    gather(key = date_position, value = date, starts_with("date")) %>%
    gather(key = value_position, value = value, starts_with("value")) %>%
    mutate(date_position = gsub('[^0-9]', "", date_position),
           value_position = gsub('[^0-9]', "", value_position)) %>%
    filter(date_position == value_position) %>%
    select(-ends_with("position")) %>%
    arrange(id)