sum columns with similar names in R

Question

I\'ve got a dataframe that\'s got lots of columns that are something like this:

data <- data.frame (a.1 = 1:5, a.2b = 3:7, a.5 = 5:9, bt.16 = 4:8, bt.1234         


        

Answer 1

You can try

library(tidyverse)
data.frame (a.1 = 1:5, a.2b = 3:7, a.5 = 5:9, bt.16 = 4:8, bt.12342 = 7:11) %>% 
  rownames_to_column() %>% 
  gather(k, v, -rowname) %>% 
  separate(k, letters[1:2]) %>% 
  group_by(rowname, a) %>% 
  summarise(Sum=sum(v)) %>% 
  spread(a, Sum)
#> # A tibble: 5 x 3
#> # Groups:   rowname [5]
#>   rowname     a    bt
#>       
#> 1 1           9    11
#> 2 2          12    13
#> 3 3          15    15
#> 4 4          18    17
#> 5 5          21    19

Created on 2018-04-16 by the reprex package (v0.2.0).