The R Journal: article published in 2021, volume 13:1

Wide-to-tall Data Reshaping Using Regular Expressions and the nc Package
Toby Dylan Hocking , The R Journal (2021) 13:1, pages 69-82.

Abstract Regular expressions are powerful tools for extracting tables from non-tabular text data. Capturing regular expressions that describe the information to extract from column names can be especially useful when reshaping a data table from wide (few rows with many regularly named columns) to tall (fewer columns with more rows). We present the R package nc (short for named capture), which provides functions for wide-to-tall data reshaping using regular expressions. We describe the main new ideas of nc, and provide detailed comparisons with related R packages (stats, utils, data.table, tidyr, tidyfast, tidyfst, reshape2, cdata).

Received: 2020-04-30; online 2021-06-07, supplementary material, (136.9 KiB)
CRAN packages: ggplot2, nc, namedCapture, rematch2, rex, stringr, stringi, tidyr, re2r, reshape2, tidyfast, tidyfst, cdata, microbenchmark
CRAN Task Views implied by cited CRAN packages: Graphics, NaturalLanguageProcessing, Phylogenetics, TeachingStatistics

This article and supplementary materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

@article{RJ-2021-029,
  author = {Toby Dylan Hocking},
  title = {{Wide-to-tall Data Reshaping Using Regular Expressions and
          the nc Package}},
  year = {2021},
  journal = {{The R Journal}},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2021-029},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2021-029},
  pages = {69--82},
  volume = {13},
  number = {1}
}