Reshaping data long to wide not creating new columns

Question

I am trying to reshape my data from long to wide format.

My dataset is 5million rows, but here is the general format::

ID   fact_id   fact_value

1      1           a
1      2           b
1      3           a
1      4           a
1      5           a
1      6           a
2      1           b
2      2           a
2      3           b
3      4           c
4      1           a
4      2           b
4      3           c

ID is the participant ID number. fact_id corresponds to a question in a survey. fact_value corresponds to the participant's answer.

I am trying to pivot the data to a wide format, so each "ID" has it's own row, and the fact_id number is the new column value. Example of what I want:

ID   1     2     3     4     5    6    

1    a     b     a     a     a    a 
2    b     a     b     NA    NA   NA
3    NA    NA    NA    c     NA   NA 
4    a     b     c     NA    NA   NA

I ran this code:

widedata <- longdata %>%
  reshape(idvar = "ID", v.names = "fact_value", timevar = "fact_id", direction = "wide")

and my output is weird. Here is an image (my ID column is actually md5id): Each ID value does have it's own row. However, the fact_id numbers are not creating their own columns. There is an ID column, and a column that says fact_value.c( the list of fact_id numbers that should be column names ). The fact_values are not showing up anywhere -- there are just NA values.

ID and fact_value are "characters" and fact_id is an "integer". I ran this as well, and got the same result:

widedata <- longdata %>%
  reshape(idvar = "ID", v.names = "fact_value", timevar = as.character("fact_id"), direction = "wide")

I also ran this, and got the same result:

widedata <- longdata%>%
  reshape(idvar = "ID", timevar = "fact_id", direction = "wide")

Any idea what could be happening/how to change my code?

Answer 1

We could use pivot_wider :

library(tidyr)

pivot_wider(df, names_from = fact_id, values_from = fact_value

     ID `1`   `2`   `3`   `4`   `5`   `6`  
  <int> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
1     1 a     b     a     a     a     a    
2     2 b     a     b     NA    NA    NA   
3     3 NA    NA    NA    c     NA    NA   
4     4 a     b     c     NA    NA    NA