pivot_longer with multiple date columns

Question

I have a dataframe with rows such as:

dt <- data.frame(id = c(1,1), start = as.Date(c("2020-01-01", "2021-02-01")), end = as.Date(c("2020-12-31", "2022-01-31")), cancelled = as.Date(c("2021-01-10", NA)))

dt
## id      start        end  cancelled
##  1 2020-01-01 2020-12-31 2021-01-10
##  1 2021-02-01 2022-01-31       <NA>

and I would like to pivot_longer to obtain:

id   date        action
1    2020-01-01  start
1    2020-12-31  end
1    2021-01-10  cancelled
1    2021-02-01  start
1    2022-01-31  end

I thought that this would work, but it produces an error:

dt %>% 
pivot_wider(
  cols = !id, 
  names_to = "date", 
  values_to = "action")

Error: 2 components of `...` were not used.

We detected these problematic arguments:
* `names_to`
* `values_to`

Did you misspecify an argument?

You are using pivot_wider instead of pivot_longer. Use pivot_longer(dt, cols = !id, names_to = "date", values_to = "action", values_drop_na = TRUE) — Ronak Shah
– Ronak Shah, Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 8:53

AnilGoyal · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-30 08:54:00Z

1

dt %>% pivot_longer(-id) %>% filter(!is.na(value))

# A tibble: 5 x 3
     id name      value     
  <dbl> <chr>     <date>    
1     1 start     2020-01-01
2     1 end       2020-12-31
3     1 cancelled 2021-01-10
4     1 start     2021-02-01
5     1 end       2022-01-31

answered Mar 30, 2021 at 8:54

AnilGoyal

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