👀 Views: 10 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-14

r tidyr data-wrangling R

I'm attempting to set up I'm experimenting with After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out..... I'm trying to reshape my data using `tidyr::pivot_longer`, but I'm running into issues when my data frame contains both numeric and character columns. The function seems to be converting all my numeric values to character strings, which isn't what I expected. Here's a simplified version of my data frame: ```r library(tidyr) my_data <- data.frame( id = 1:3, measurement1 = c(2.5, 3.6, NA), measurement2 = c('A', 'B', 'C') ) ``` When I run the following command: ```r long_data <- my_data %>% pivot_longer(cols = c(measurement1, measurement2), names_to = 'measurement', values_to = 'value') ``` I get this warning: ``` Warning message: In `pivot_longer()`: Converting 'measurement1' to a character type. ``` And the resulting data frame looks like this: ``` # A tibble: 6 x 3 id measurement value <int> <chr> <chr> 1 1 measurement1 2.5 2 1 measurement2 A 3 2 measurement1 3.6 4 2 measurement2 B 5 3 measurement1 NA 6 3 measurement2 C ``` As you can see, the numeric values in `measurement1` are now characters, which makes it impossible for me to perform calculations on them later. I tried using `mutate` beforehand to explicitly convert `measurement1` back to numeric: ```r my_data <- my_data %>% mutate(measurement1 = as.numeric(measurement1)) ``` However, this doesn't seem to solve the issue. I also checked for other data type inconsistencies in my data frame, but everything looks fine. Is there a way to ensure that `pivot_longer` retains the numeric type of my columns? Any help would be greatly appreciated! This is part of a larger service I'm building. Any help would be greatly appreciated! This issue appeared after updating to R 3.9. My development environment is Windows 10. What's the best practice here? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.