R paste data frame rows that belong to same id

Question

I am trying to paste together text data from the same user that is currently organized in different rows by name:

df <- read.table(header = TRUE, text = 'name text
"katy" "tomorrow I go"
"lauren" "and computing"
"katy" "to the store"
"stephanie" "foo and foos"')

to have a result of:

df2 <- read.table(header=TRUE, text='name text
"katy" "tomorrow I go to the store"
"lauren" "and computing"
"stephanie" "foo and foos"')

suggestions?

Answer 1

We can use either data.table or dplyr or aggregate to paste the 'text' column grouped by 'name'. With data.table, we convert the 'data.frame' to 'data.table' (setDT(df)), before doing this.

library(data.table)
setDT(df)[, list(text=paste(text, collapse=' ')), by = name]

---

Using dplyr

library(dplyr)
df %>%
   group_by(name) %>%
   summarise(text=paste(text, collapse=' '))

---

Or with base R

aggregate(text~name, df, FUN= paste, collapse=' ')