# Box Me

November 8, 2013
By

(This article was first published on Drunks&Lampposts » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Here’s a short R function I wrote to turn a long data set into a wide one for viewing. It’s not the most exciting function ever but I find it quite useful when my screen is wide and short. It simply cuts the data set horizontally into equal size pieces and puts them side by side. Lazy I know!


#'boxMe
#'
#'Turns an overly long data frame into something easier to look at
#'
#' @param d A dataframe or matrix
#' @param nrow The number of rows you would like to see in the new dataframe
#' @examples
#' test.set<-data.frame(x=rnorm(100), y=rnorm(100))
#' boxMe(test.set, 18)
#'
#' library(ggplot2)
#' boxMe(diamonds, 10)

boxMe<-function(d, nrow){

# Number of rows and columns
r<-dim(d)[1]
c<-dim(d)[2]

rem<-r %% nrow # Number of blank rows
reps<-floor(r/nrow) # Number of folds
s<-seq(1, reps*nrow, by=nrow) # Breaks

box<-d[1:nrow,] # First col

for (i in s[-1]){

ap<-d[i:(i+nrow-1),]
box<-cbind(box, ap)

}

#Append remainder

if (rem>0){

n.null.rows<-nrow-rem
rem.rows<-d[(reps*nrow+1):r,]
null.block<-as.data.frame(matrix(rep(NA, (n.null.rows*c)), nrow=n.null.rows))
names(null.block)<-names(rem.rows)
last.block<-rbind(rem.rows, null.block)
box<-cbind(box, last.block)

}

return(box)

}