How to reshape tabular data to one row per group

Question

I am an R (and coding novice) and I am looking for a way to reconfigure Table A show below into Table B.

Table A:

type   x1  x2  x3  
A      4   6            


        

Answer 1

A bit late to the party, but this can also be done quite easily with the dcast function of the data.table package because you can use multiple value.var's in it:

library(data.table)

dcast(setDT(d), type ~ rowid(type), value.var = c('x1','x2','x3'), sep = '')

which gives:

   type x11 x12 x13 x21 x22 x23 x31 x32 x33
1:    A   4   7   9   6   4   6   9   1   2
2:    B   1   2  NA   3   7  NA   8   9  NA

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You can also do this in base R with:

d$num <- ave(d$x1, d$type, FUN = seq_along)
reshape(d, idvar = 'type', direction = 'wide', timevar = 'num', sep = '')