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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

tidyr 1.3.1

CRAN release: 2024-01-24

  • pivot_wider now uses .by and |> syntax for the dplyr helper message to identify duplicates (@boshek, #1516)

tidyr 1.3.0

CRAN release: 2023-01-24

New features

Breaking changes

Lifecycle changes

  • All functions deprecated in tidyr 1.0 and 1.2 (the old lazyeval functions ending in _ and various arguments to unnest()) now warn on every use. They will be made defunct in 2024 (#1406).

Rectangling

  • unnest_longer() now consistently drops rows with either NULL or empty vectors (like integer()) by default. Set the new keep_empty argument to TRUE to retain them. Previously, keep_empty = TRUE was implicitly being used for NULL, while keep_empty = FALSE was being used for empty vectors, which was inconsistent with all other tidyr verbs with this argument (#1363).

  • unnest_longer() now uses "" in the index column for fully unnamed vectors. It also now consistently uses NA in the index column for empty vectors that are “kept” by keep_empty = TRUE (#1442).

  • unnest_wider() now errors if any values being unnested are unnamed and names_sep is not provided (#1367).

  • unnest_wider() now generates automatic names for partially unnamed vectors. Previously it only generated them for fully unnamed vectors, resulting in a strange mix of automatic names and name-repaired names (#1367).

Bug fixes and minor improvements

General

  • Most tidyr functions now consistently disallow renaming during tidy-selection. Renaming was never meaningful in these functions, and previously either had no effect or caused problems (#1449, #1104).

  • tidyr errors (including input validation) have been thoroughly reviewed and should generally be more likely to point you in the right direction (#1313, #1400).

  • uncount() is now generic so implementations can be provided for objects other than data frames (@mgirlich, #1358).

  • uncount() gains a ... argument. It comes between the required and the optional arguments (@mgirlich, #1358).

  • nest(), complete(), expand(), and fill() now document their support for grouped data frames created by dplyr::group_by() (#952).

  • All built in datasets are now standard tibbles (#1459).

  • R >=3.4.0 is now required, in line with the tidyverse standard of supporting the previous 5 minor releases of R.

  • rlang >=1.0.4 and vctrs >=0.5.2 are now required (#1344, #1470).

  • Removed dependency on ellipsis in favor of equivalent functions in rlang (#1314).

Nesting, packing, and chopping

Pivoting

Missing values

  • fill() now works correctly when there is a column named .direction in data (#1319, @tjmahr).

  • replace_na() is faster when there aren’t any missing values to replace (#1392, @mgirlich).

  • The documentation of the replace argument of replace_na() now mentions that replace is always cast to the type of data (#1317).

tidyr 1.2.1

CRAN release: 2022-09-08

  • Hot patch release to resolve R CMD check failures.

tidyr 1.2.0

CRAN release: 2022-02-01

Breaking changes

  • complete() and expand() no longer allow you to complete or expand on a grouping column. This was never well-defined since completion/expansion on a grouped data frame happens “within” each group and otherwise has the potential to produce erroneous results (#1299).

  • replace_na() no longer allows the type of data to change when the replacement is applied. replace will now always be cast to the type of data before the replacement is made. For example, this means that using a replacement value of 1.5 on an integer column is no longer allowed. Similarly, replacing missing values in a list-column must now be done with list("foo") rather than just "foo".

Pivoting

  • pivot_wider() gains new names_expand and id_expand arguments for turning implicit missing factor levels and variable combinations into explicit ones. This is similar to the drop argument from spread() (#770).

  • pivot_wider() gains a new names_vary argument for controlling the ordering when combining names_from values with values_from column names (#839).

  • pivot_wider() gains a new unused_fn argument for controlling how to summarize unused columns that aren’t involved in the pivoting process (#990, thanks to @mgirlich for an initial implementation).

  • pivot_longer()’s names_transform and values_transform arguments now accept a single function which will be applied to all of the columns (#1284, thanks to @smingerson for an initial implementation).

  • pivot_longer()’s names_ptypes and values_ptypes arguments now accept a single empty ptype which will be applied to all of the columns (#1284).

Nesting

  • unnest() and unchop()’s ptype argument now accepts a single empty ptype which will be applied to all cols (#1284).

  • unpack() now silently skips over any non-data frame columns specified by cols. This matches the existing behavior of unchop() and unnest() (#1153).

Rectangling

  • unnest_wider() and unnest_longer() can now unnest multiple columns at once (#740).

  • unnest_longer()’s indices_to and values_to arguments now accept a glue specification, which is useful when unnesting multiple columns.

  • For hoist(), unnest_longer(), and unnest_wider(), if a ptype is supplied, but that column can’t be simplified, the result will be a list-of column where each element has type ptype (#998).

  • unnest_wider() gains a new strict argument which controls whether or not strict vctrs typing rules should be applied. It defaults to FALSE for backwards compatibility, and because it is often more useful to be lax when unnesting JSON, which doesn’t always map one-to-one with R’s types (#1125).

  • hoist(), unnest_longer(), and unnest_wider()’s simplify argument now accepts a named list of TRUE or FALSE to control simplification on a per column basis (#995).

  • hoist(), unnest_longer(), and unnest_wider()’s transform argument now accepts a single function which will be applied to all components (#1284).

  • hoist(), unnest_longer(), and unnest_wider()’s ptype argument now accepts a single empty ptype which will be applied to all components (#1284).

Grids

  • complete() gains a new explicit argument for limiting fill to only implicit missing values. This is useful if you don’t want to fill in pre-existing missing values (#1270).

  • complete() gains a grouped data frame method. This generates a more correct completed data frame when groups are involved (#396, #966).

Missing values

  • drop_na(), replace_na(), and fill() have been updated to utilize vctrs. This means that you can use these functions on a wider variety of column types, including lubridate’s Period types (#1094), data frame columns, and the rcrd type from vctrs.

  • replace_na() no longer replaces empty atomic elements in list-columns (like integer(0)). The only value that is replaced in a list-column is NULL (#1168).

  • drop_na() no longer drops empty atomic elements from list-columns (like integer(0)). The only value that is dropped in a list-column is NULL (#1228).

Bug fixes and minor improvements

General

  • @mgirlich is now a tidyr author in recognition of his significant and sustained contributions.

  • All lazyeval variants of tidyr verbs have been soft-deprecated. Expect them to move to the defunct stage in the next minor release of tidyr (#1294).

  • any_of() and all_of() from tidyselect are now re-exported (#1217).

  • dplyr >= 1.0.0 is now required.

Pivoting

  • pivot_wider() now gives better advice about how to identify duplicates when values are not uniquely identified (#1113).

  • pivot_wider() now throws a more informative error when values_fn doesn’t result in a single summary value (#1238).

  • pivot_wider() and pivot_longer() now generate more informative errors related to name repair (#987).

  • pivot_wider() now works correctly when values_fill is a data frame.

  • pivot_wider() no longer accidentally retains values_from when pivoting a zero row data frame (#1249).

  • pivot_wider() now correctly handles the case where an id column name collides with a value from names_from (#1107).

  • pivot_wider() and pivot_longer() now both check that the spec columns .name and .value are character vectors. Additionally, the .name column must be unique (#1107).

  • pivot_wider()’s names_from and values_from arguments are now required if their default values of name and value don’t correspond to columns in data. Additionally, they must identify at least 1 column in data (#1240).

  • pivot_wider()’s values_fn argument now correctly allows anonymous functions (#1114).

  • pivot_wider_spec() now works correctly with a 0-row data frame and a spec that doesn’t identify any rows (#1250, #1252).

  • pivot_longer()’s names_ptypes argument is now applied after names_transform for consistency with the rectangling functions (i.e. hoist()) (#1233).

  • check_pivot_spec() is a new developer facing function for validating a pivot spec argument. This is only useful if you are extending pivot_longer() or pivot_wider() with new S3 methods (#1087).

Nesting

  • The nest() generic now avoids computing on .data, making it more compatible with lazy tibbles (#1134).

  • The .names_sep argument of the data.frame method for nest() is now actually used (#1174).

  • unnest()’s ptype argument now works as expected (#1158).

  • unpack() no longer drops empty columns specified through cols (#1191).

  • unpack() now works correctly with data frame columns containing 1 row but 0 columns (#1189).

  • chop() now works correctly with data frames with 0 rows (#1206).

  • chop()’s cols argument is no longer optional. This matches the behavior of cols seen elsewhere in tidyr (#1205).

  • unchop() now respects ptype when unnesting a non-list column (#1211).

Rectangling

  • hoist() no longer accidentally removes elements that have duplicated names (#1259).

Grids

  • The grouped data frame methods for complete() and expand() now move the group columns to the front of the result (in addition to the columns you completed on or expanded, which were already moved to the front). This should make more intuitive sense, as you are completing or expanding “within” each group, so the group columns should be the first thing you see (#1289).

  • complete() now applies fill even when no columns to complete are specified (#1272).

  • expand(), crossing(), and nesting() now correctly retain NA values of factors (#1275).

  • expand_grid(), expand(), nesting(), and crossing() now silently apply name repair to automatically named inputs. This avoids a number of issues resulting from duplicate truncated names (#1116, #1221, #1092, #1037, #992).

  • expand_grid(), expand(), nesting(), and crossing() now allow columns from unnamed data frames to be used in expressions after that data frame was specified, like expand_grid(tibble(x = 1), y = x). This is more consistent with how tibble() behaves.

  • expand_grid(), expand(), nesting(), and crossing() now work correctly with data frames containing 0 columns but >0 rows (#1189).

  • expand_grid(), expand(), nesting(), and crossing() now return a 1 row data frame when no inputs are supplied, which is more consistent with prod() == 1L and the idea that computations involving the number of combinations computed from an empty set should return 1 (#1258).

Missing values

  • drop_na() no longer drops missing values from all columns when a tidyselect expression that results in 0 columns being selected is used (#1227).

  • fill() now treats NaN like any other missing value (#982).

tidyr 1.1.4

CRAN release: 2021-09-27

tidyr 1.1.3

CRAN release: 2021-03-03

tidyr 1.1.2

CRAN release: 2020-08-27

tidyr 1.1.1

CRAN release: 2020-07-31

tidyr 1.1.0

CRAN release: 2020-05-20

General features

  • pivot_longer(), hoist(), unnest_wider(), and unnest_longer() gain new transform arguments; these allow you to transform values “in flight”. They are partly needed because vctrs coercion rules have become stricter, but they give you greater flexibility than was available previously (#921).

  • Arguments that use tidy selection syntax are now clearly documented and have been updated to use tidyselect 1.1.0 (#872).

Pivoting improvements

  • Both pivot_wider() and pivot_longer() are considerably more performant, thanks largely to improvements in the underlying vctrs code (#790, @DavisVaughan).

  • pivot_longer() now supports names_to = character() which prevents the name column from being created (#961).

    df <- tibble(id = 1:3, x_1 = 1:3, x_2 = 4:6)  
df %>% pivot_longer(-id, names_to = character())

  • pivot_longer() no longer creates a .copy variable in the presence of duplicate column names. This makes it more consistent with the handling of non-unique specs.

  • pivot_longer() automatically disambiguates non-unique ouputs, which can occur when the input variables include some additional component that you don’t care about and want to discard (#792, #793).

    df <- tibble(id = 1:3, x_1 = 1:3, x_2 = 4:6)  
df %>% pivot_longer(-id, names_pattern = "(.)_.")
df %>% pivot_longer(-id, names_sep = "_", names_to = c("name", NA))
df %>% pivot_longer(-id, names_sep = "_", names_to = c(".value", NA))

  • pivot_wider() gains a names_sort argument which allows you to sort column names in order. The default, FALSE, orders columns by their first appearance (#839). In a future version, I’ll consider changing the default to TRUE.

  • pivot_wider() gains a names_glue argument that allows you to construct output column names with a glue specification.

  • pivot_wider() arguments values_fn and values_fill can now be single values; you now only need to use a named list if you want to use different values for different value columns (#739, #746). They also get improved errors if they’re not of the expected type.

Rectangling

  • hoist() now automatically names pluckers that are a single string (#837). It error if you use duplicated column names (@mgirlich, #834), and now uses rlang::list2() behind the scenes (which means that you can now use !!! and :=) (#801).

  • unnest_longer(), unnest_wider(), and hoist() do a better job simplifying list-cols. They no longer add unneeded unspecified() when the result is still a list (#806), and work when the list contains non-vectors (#810, #848).

  • unnest_wider(names_sep = "") now provides default names for unnamed inputs, suppressing the many previous name repair messages (#742).

Nesting

Bug fixes and minor improvements

tidyr 1.0.2

CRAN release: 2020-01-24

  • Minor fixes for dev versions of rlang, tidyselect, and tibble.

tidyr 1.0.1

  • Did not exist since I accidentally released v1.0.2

tidyr 1.0.0

CRAN release: 2019-09-11

Breaking changes

See vignette("in-packages") for a detailed transition guide.

  • nest() and unnest() have new syntax. The majority of existing usage should be automatically translated to the new syntax with a warning. If that doesn’t work, put this in your script to use the old versions until you can take a closer look and update your code:

    
library(tidyr)
nest <- nest_legacy
unnest <- unnest_legacy

  • nest() now preserves grouping, which has implications for downstream calls to group-aware functions, such as dplyr::mutate() and filter().

  • The first argument of nest() has changed from data to .data.

  • unnest() uses the emerging tidyverse standard to disambiguate unique names. Use names_repair = tidyr_legacy to request the previous approach.

  • unnest_()/nest_() and the lazyeval methods for unnest()/nest() are now defunct. They have been deprecated for some time, and, since the interface has changed, package authors will need to update to avoid deprecation warnings. I think one clean break should be less work for everyone.

    All other lazyeval functions have been formally deprecated, and will be made defunct in the next major release. (See lifecycle vignette for details on deprecation stages).

  • crossing() and nesting() now return 0-row outputs if any input is a length-0 vector. If you want to preserve the previous behaviour which silently dropped these inputs, you should convert empty vectors to NULL. (More discussion on this general pattern at https://github.com/tidyverse/principles/issues/24)

Pivoting

New pivot_longer() and pivot_wider() provide modern alternatives to spread() and gather(). They have been carefully redesigned to be easier to learn and remember, and include many new features. Learn more in vignette("pivot").

These functions resolve multiple existing issues with spread()/gather(). Both functions now handle mulitple value columns (#149/#150), support more vector types (#333), use tidyverse conventions for duplicated column names (#496, #478), and are symmetric (#453). pivot_longer() gracefully handles duplicated column names (#472), and can directly split column names into multiple variables. pivot_wider() can now aggregate (#474), select keys (#572), and has control over generated column names (#208).

To demonstrate how these functions work in practice, tidyr has gained several new datasets: relig_income, construction, billboard, us_rent_income, fish_encounters and world_bank_pop.

Finally, tidyr demos have been removed. They are dated, and have been superseded by vignette("pivot").

Rectangling

tidyr contains four new functions to support rectangling, turning a deeply nested list into a tidy tibble: unnest_longer(), unnest_wider(), unnest_auto(), and hoist(). They are documented in a new vignette: vignette("rectangle").

unnest_longer() and unnest_wider() make it easier to unnest list-columns of vectors into either rows or columns (#418). unnest_auto() automatically picks between _longer() and _wider() using heuristics based on the presence of common names.

New hoist() provides a convenient way of plucking components of a list-column out into their own top-level columns (#341). This is particularly useful when you are working with deeply nested JSON, because it provides a convenient shortcut for the mutate() + map() pattern:

df %>% hoist(metadata, name = "name")
# shortcut for
df %>% mutate(name = map_chr(metadata, "name"))

Nesting

nest() and unnest() have been updated with new interfaces that are more closely aligned to evolving tidyverse conventions. They use the theory developed in vctrs to more consistently handle mixtures of input types, and their arguments have been overhauled based on the last few years of experience. They are supported by a new vignette("nest"), which outlines some of the main ideas of nested data (it’s still very rough, but will get better over time).

The biggest change is to their operation with multiple columns: df %>% unnest(x, y, z) becomes df %>% unnest(c(x, y, z)) and df %>% nest(x, y, z) becomes df %>% nest(data = c(x, y, z)).

I have done my best to ensure that common uses of nest() and unnest() will continue to work, generating an informative warning telling you precisely how you need to update your code. Please file an issue if I’ve missed an important use case.

unnest() has been overhauled:

  • New keep_empty parameter ensures that every row in the input gets at least one row in the output, inserting missing values as needed (#358).

  • Provides names_sep argument to control how inner and outer column names are combined.

  • Uses standard tidyverse name-repair rules, so by default you will get an error if the output would contain multiple columns with the same name. You can override by using name_repair (#514).

  • Now supports NULL entries (#436).

Packing and chopping

Under the hood, nest() and unnest() are implemented with chop(), pack(), unchop(), and unpack():

Packing and chopping are interesting primarily because they are the atomic operations underlying nesting (and similarly, unchop and unpacking underlie unnesting), and I don’t expect them to be used directly very often.

New features

  • New expand_grid(), a tidy version of expand.grid(), is lower-level than the existing expand() and crossing() functions, as it takes individual vectors, and does not sort or uniquify them.

  • crossing(), nesting(), and expand() have been rewritten to use the vctrs package. This should not affect much existing code, but considerably simplies the implementation and ensures that these functions work consistently across all generalised vectors (#557). As part of this alignment, these functions now only drop NULL inputs, not any 0-length vector.

Bug fixes and minor improvements

  • full_seq() now also works when gaps between observations are shorter than the given period, but are within the tolerance given by tol. Previously, gaps between consecutive observations had to be in the range [period, period + tol]; gaps can now be in the range [period - tol, period + tol] (@ha0ye, #657).

  • tidyr now re-exports tibble(), as_tibble(), and tribble(), as well as the tidyselect helpers (starts_with(), ends_width(), …). This makes generating documentation, reprexes, and tests easier, and makes tidyr easier to use without also attaching dplyr.

  • All functions that take ... have been instrumented with functions from the ellipsis package to warn if you’ve supplied arguments that are ignored (typically because you’ve misspelled an argument name) (#573).

  • complete() now uses full_join() so that all levels are preserved even when not all levels are specified (@Ryo-N7, #493).

  • crossing() now takes the unique values of data frame inputs, not just vector inputs (#490).

  • gather() throws an error if a column is a data frame (#553).

  • extract() (and hence pivot_longer()) can extract multiple input values into a single output column (#619).

  • fill() is now implemented using dplyr::mutate_at(). This radically simplifies the implementation and considerably improves performance when working with grouped data (#520).

  • fill() now accepts downup and updown as fill directions (@coolbutuseless, #505).

  • unite() gains na.rm argument, making it easier to remove missing values prior to uniting values together (#203)

tidyr 0.8.3

CRAN release: 2019-03-01

tidyr 0.8.2

CRAN release: 2018-10-28

  • separate() now accepts NA as a column name in the into argument to denote columns which are omitted from the result. (@markdly, #397).

  • Minor updates to ensure compatibility with dependencies.

tidyr 0.8.1

CRAN release: 2018-05-18

  • unnest() weakens test of “atomicity” to restore previous behaviour when unnesting factors and dates (#407).

tidyr 0.8.0

CRAN release: 2018-01-29

Breaking changes

  • There are no deliberate breaking changes in this release. However, a number of packages are failing with errors related to numbers of elements in columns, and row names. It is possible that these are accidental API changes or new bugs. If you see such an error in your package, I would sincerely appreciate a minimal reprex.

  • separate() now correctly uses -1 to refer to the far right position, instead of -2. If you depended on this behaviour, you’ll need to switch on packageVersion("tidyr") > "0.7.2"

New features

Bug fixes and minor improvements

  • complete(data) now returns data rather than throwing an error (#390). complete() with zero-length completions returns original input (#331).

  • crossing() preserves NAs (#364).

  • expand() with empty input gives empty data frame instead of NULL (#331).

  • expand(), crossing(), and complete() now complete empty factors instead of dropping them (#270, #285)

  • extract() has a better error message if regex does not contain the expected number of groups (#313).

  • drop_na() no longer drops columns (@jennybryan, #245), and works with list-cols (#280). Equivalent of NA in a list column is any empty (length 0) data structure.

  • nest() is now faster, especially when a long data frame is collapsed into a nested data frame with few rows.

  • nest() on a zero-row data frame works as expected (#320).

  • replace_na() no longer complains if you try and replace missing values in variables not present in the data (#356).

  • replace_na() now also works with vectors (#342, @flying-sheep), and can replace NULL in list-columns. It throws a better error message if you attempt to replace with something other than length 1.

  • separate() no longer checks that ... is empty, allowing methods to make use of it. This check was added in tidyr 0.4.0 (2016-02-02) to deprecate previous behaviour where ... was passed to strsplit().

  • separate() and extract() now insert columns in correct position when drop = TRUE (#394).

  • separate() now works correctly counts from RHS when using negative integer sep values (@markdly, #315).

  • separate() gets improved warning message when pieces aren’t as expected (#375).

  • separate_rows() supports list columns (#321), and works with empty tibbles.

  • spread() now consistently returns 0 row outputs for 0 row inputs (#269).

  • spread() now works when key column includes NA and drop is FALSE (#254).

  • spread() no longer returns tibbles with row names (#322).

  • spread(), separate(), extract() (#255), and gather() (#347) now replace existing variables rather than creating an invalid data frame with duplicated variable names (matching the semantics of mutate).

  • unite() now works (as documented) if you don’t supply any variables (#355).

  • unnest() gains preserve argument which allows you to preserve list columns without unnesting them (#328).

  • unnest() can unnested list-columns contains lists of lists (#278).

  • unnest(df) now works if df contains no list-cols (#344)

tidyr 0.7.2

CRAN release: 2017-10-16

  • The SE variants gather_(), spread_() and nest_() now treat non-syntactic names in the same way as pre tidy eval versions of tidyr (#361).

  • Fix tidyr bug revealed by R-devel.

tidyr 0.7.1

CRAN release: 2017-09-01

This is a hotfix release to account for some tidyselect changes in the unit tests.

Note that the upcoming version of tidyselect backtracks on some of the changes announced for 0.7.0. The special evaluation semantics for selection have been changed back to the old behaviour because the new rules were causing too much trouble and confusion. From now on data expressions (symbols and calls to : and c()) can refer to both registered variables and to objects from the context.

However the semantics for context expressions (any calls other than to : and c()) remain the same. Those expressions are evaluated in the context only and cannot refer to registered variables. If you’re writing functions and refer to contextual objects, it is still a good idea to avoid data expressions by following the advice of the 0.7.0 release notes.

tidyr 0.7.0

CRAN release: 2017-08-16

This release includes important changes to tidyr internals. Tidyr now supports the new tidy evaluation framework for quoting (NSE) functions. It also uses the new tidyselect package as selecting backend.

Breaking changes

  • If you see error messages about objects or functions not found, it is likely because the selecting functions are now stricter in their arguments An example of selecting function is gather() and its ... argument. This change makes the code more robust by disallowing ambiguous scoping. Consider the following code:

    x <- 3
df <- tibble(w = 1, x = 2, y = 3)
gather(df, "variable", "value", 1:x)

    Does it select the first three columns (using the x defined in the global environment), or does it select the first two columns (using the column named x)?

    To solve this ambiguity, we now make a strict distinction between data and context expressions. A data expression is either a bare name or an expression like x:y or c(x, y). In a data expression, you can only refer to columns from the data frame. Everything else is a context expression in which you can only refer to objects that you have defined with <-.

    In practice this means that you can no longer refer to contextual objects like this:

    mtcars %>% gather(var, value, 1:ncol(mtcars))

x <- 3
mtcars %>% gather(var, value, 1:x)
mtcars %>% gather(var, value, -(1:x))

    You now have to be explicit about where to find objects. To do so, you can use the quasiquotation operator !! which will evaluate its argument early and inline the result:

    mtcars %>% gather(var, value, !! 1:ncol(mtcars))
mtcars %>% gather(var, value, !! 1:x)
mtcars %>% gather(var, value, !! -(1:x))

    An alternative is to turn your data expression into a context expression by using seq() or seq_len() instead of :. See the section on tidyselect for more information about these semantics.

  • Following the switch to tidy evaluation, you might see warnings about the “variable context not set”. This is most likely caused by supplying helpers like everything() to underscored versions of tidyr verbs. Helpers should be always be evaluated lazily. To fix this, just quote the helper with a formula: drop_na(df, ~everything()).

  • The selecting functions are now stricter when you supply integer positions. If you see an error along the lines of

    `-0.949999999999999`, `-0.940000000000001`, ... must resolve to
integer column positions, not a double vector

    please round the positions before supplying them to tidyr. Double vectors are fine as long as they are rounded.

Switch to tidy evaluation

tidyr is now a tidy evaluation grammar. See the programming vignette in dplyr for practical information about tidy evaluation.

The tidyr port is a bit special. While the philosophy of tidy evaluation is that R code should refer to real objects (from the data frame or from the context), we had to make some exceptions to this rule for tidyr. The reason is that several functions accept bare symbols to specify the names of new columns to create (gather() being a prime example). This is not tidy because the symbol do not represent any actual object. Our workaround is to capture these arguments using rlang::quo_name() (so they still support quasiquotation and you can unquote symbols or strings). This type of NSE is now discouraged in the tidyverse: symbols in R code should represent real objects.

Following the switch to tidy eval the underscored variants are softly deprecated. However they will remain around for some time and without warning for backward compatibility.

Switch to the tidyselect backend

The selecting backend of dplyr has been extracted in a standalone package tidyselect which tidyr now uses for selecting variables. It is used for selecting multiple variables (in drop_na()) as well as single variables (the col argument of extract() and separate(), and the key and value arguments of spread()). This implies the following changes:

  • The arguments for selecting a single variable now support all features from dplyr::pull(). You can supply a name or a position, including negative positions.

  • Multiple variables are now selected a bit differently. We now make a strict distinction between data and context expressions. A data expression is either a bare name of an expression like x:y or c(x, y). In a data expression, you can only refer to columns from the data frame. Everything else is a context expression in which you can only refer to objects that you have defined with <-.

    You can still refer to contextual objects in a data expression by being explicit. One way of being explicit is to unquote a variable from the environment with the tidy eval operator !!:

    
x <- 2
drop_na(df, 2)     # Works fine
drop_na(df, x)     # Object 'x' not found
drop_na(df, !! x)  # Works as if you had supplied 2

    On the other hand, select helpers like start_with() are context expressions. It is therefore easy to refer to objects and they will never be ambiguous with data columns:

    x <- "d"
drop_na(df, starts_with(x))

    While these special rules is in contrast to most dplyr and tidyr verbs (where both the data and the context are in scope) they make sense for selecting functions and should provide more robust and helpful semantics.

tidyr 0.6.3

CRAN release: 2017-05-15

  • Patch tests to be compatible with dev tibble

tidyr 0.6.2

CRAN release: 2017-05-04

  • Register C functions

  • Added package docs

  • Patch tests to be compatible with dev dplyr.

tidyr 0.6.1

CRAN release: 2017-01-10

tidyr 0.6.0

CRAN release: 2016-08-12

API changes

  • drop_na() removes observations which have NA in the given variables. If no variables are given, all variables are considered (#194, @janschulz).

  • extract_numeric() has been deprecated (#213).

  • Renamed table4 and table5 to table4a and table4b to make their connection more clear. The key and value variables in table2 have been renamed to type and count.

Bug fixes and minor improvements

tidyr 0.5.1

CRAN release: 2016-06-14

  • Restored compatibility with R < 3.3.0 by avoiding getS3method(envir = ) (#205, @krlmlr).

tidyr 0.5.0

CRAN release: 2016-06-12

New functions

Bug fixes and minor improvements

  • complete() preserves grouping created by dplyr (#168).

  • expand() (and hence complete()) preserves the ordered attribute of factors (#165).

  • full_seq() preserve attributes for dates and date/times (#156), and sequences no longer need to start at 0.

  • gather() can now gather together list columns (#175), and gather_.data.frame(na.rm = TRUE) now only removes missing values if they’re actually present (#173).

  • nest() returns correct output if every variable is nested (#186).

  • separate() fills from right-to-left (not left-to-right!) when fill = “left” (#170, @dgrtwo).

  • separate() and unite() now automatically drop removed variables from grouping (#159, #177).

  • spread() gains a sep argument. If not-null, this will name columns as “keyvalue”. Additionally, if sep is NULL missing values will be converted to <NA> (#68).

  • spread() works in the presence of list-columns (#199)

  • unnest() works with non-syntactic names (#190).

  • unnest() gains a sep argument. If non-null, this will rename the columns of nested data frames to include both the original column name, and the nested column name, separated by .sep (#184).

  • unnest() gains .id argument that works the same way as bind_rows(). This is useful if you have a named list of data frames or vectors (#125).

  • Moved in useful sample datasets from the DSR package.

  • Made compatible with both dplyr 0.4 and 0.5.

  • tidyr functions that create new columns are more aggressive about re-encoding the column names as UTF-8.

tidyr 0.4.1

CRAN release: 2016-02-05

  • Fixed bug in nest() where nested data was ending up in the wrong row (#158).

tidyr 0.4.0

CRAN release: 2016-01-18

Nested data frames

nest() and unnest() have been overhauled to support a useful way of structuring data frames: the nested data frame. In a grouped data frame, you have one row per observation, and additional metadata define the groups. In a nested data frame, you have one row per group, and the individual observations are stored in a column that is a list of data frames. This is a useful structure when you have lists of other objects (like models) with one element per group.

  • nest() now produces a single list of data frames called “data” rather than a list column for each variable. Nesting variables are not included in nested data frames. It also works with grouped data frames made by dplyr::group_by(). You can override the default column name with .key.

  • unnest() gains a .drop argument which controls what happens to other list columns. By default, they’re kept if the output doesn’t require row duplication; otherwise they’re dropped.

  • unnest() now has mutate() semantics for ... - this allows you to unnest transformed columns more easily. (Previously it used select semantics).

Expanding

  • expand() once again allows you to evaluate arbitrary expressions like full_seq(year). If you were previously using c() to created nested combinations, you’ll now need to use nesting() (#85, #121).

  • nesting() and crossing() allow you to create nested and crossed data frames from individual vectors. crossing() is similar to base::expand.grid()

  • full_seq(x, period) creates the full sequence of values from min(x) to max(x) every period values.

Minor bug fixes and improvements

  • fill() fills in NULLs in list-columns.

  • fill() gains a direction argument so that it can fill either upwards or downwards (#114).

  • gather() now stores the key column as character, by default. To revert to the previous behaviour of using a factor (which allows you to preserve the ordering of the columns), use key_factor = TRUE (#96).

  • All tidyr verbs do the right thing for grouped data frames created by group_by() (#122, #129, #81).

  • seq_range() has been removed. It was never used or announced.

  • spread() once again creates columns of mixed type when convert = TRUE (#118, @jennybc). spread() with drop = FALSE handles zero-length factors (#56). spread()ing a data frame with only key and value columns creates a one row output (#41).

  • unite() now removes old columns before adding new (#89, @krlmlr).

  • separate() now warns if defunct … argument is used (#151, @krlmlr).

tidyr 0.3.1

CRAN release: 2015-09-10

  • Fixed bug where attributes of non-gather columns were lost (#104)

tidyr 0.3.0

CRAN release: 2015-09-08

New features

  • New complete() provides a wrapper around expand(), left_join() and replace_na() for a common task: completing a data frame with missing combinations of variables.

  • fill() fills in missing values in a column with the last non-missing value (#4).

  • New replace_na() makes it easy to replace missing values with something meaningful for your data.

  • nest() is the complement of unnest() (#3).

  • unnest() can now work with multiple list-columns at the same time. If you don’t supply any columns names, it will unlist all list-columns (#44). unnest() can also handle columns that are lists of data frames (#58).

Bug fixes and minor improvements

  • tidyr no longer depends on reshape2. This should fix issues if you also try to load reshape (#88).

  • %>% is re-exported from magrittr.

  • expand() now supports nesting and crossing (see examples for details). This comes at the expense of creating new variables inline (#46).

  • expand_ does SE evaluation correctly so you can pass it a character vector of columns names (or list of formulas etc) (#70).

  • extract() is 10x faster because it now uses stringi instead of base R regular expressions. It also returns NA instead of throwing an error if the regular expression doesn’t match (#72).

  • extract() and separate() preserve character vectors when convert is TRUE (#99).

  • The internals of spread() have been rewritten, and now preserve all attributes of the input value column. This means that you can now spread date (#62) and factor (#35) inputs.

  • spread() gives a more informative error message if key or value don’t exist in the input data (#36).

  • separate() only displays the first 20 failures (#50). It has finer control over what happens if there are two few matches: you can fill with missing values on either the “left” or the “right” (#49). separate() no longer throws an error if the number of pieces aren’t as expected - instead it uses drops extra values and fills on the right and gives a warning.

  • If the input is NA separate() and extract() both return silently return NA outputs, rather than throwing an error. (#77)

  • Experimental unnest() method for lists has been removed.

tidyr 0.2.0

CRAN release: 2014-12-05

New functions

  • Experimental expand() function (#21).

  • Experiment unnest() function for converting named lists into data frames. (#3, #22)

Bug fixes and minor improvements

  • extract_numeric() preserves negative signs (#20).

  • gather() has better defaults if key and value are not supplied. If ... is omitted, gather() selects all columns (#28). Performance is now comparable to reshape2::melt() (#18).

  • separate() gains extra argument which lets you control what happens to extra pieces. The default is to throw an “error”, but you can also “merge” or “drop”.

  • spread() gains drop argument, which allows you to preserve missing factor levels (#25). It converts factor value variables to character vectors, instead of embedding a matrix inside the data frame (#35).