Manipulating data with dplyr

The dplyr package for R is described as a package providing a grammar for data manipulation. It has the entry points you would expect for wrangling your data frame in one package. We will use the dplyr package against the baseball player statistics we used earlier in this chapter.

We read in the player data and show the first few rows:

players <- read.csv(file="Documents/baseball.csv", header=TRUE, sep=",")
head(players)

We will be using the dplyr package, so we need to pull the package into our notebook:

library(dplyr)

Converting a data frame to a dplyr table

The dplyr package has functions to convert your data object into a dplyr table. A dplyr table stores data in a compact format using much less memory. Most of the other dplyr functions can operate directly on the table as well.

We can convert our data frame to a table using:

playerst <- tbl_df(players)playerst

This results in a very similar display pattern:

Getting a quick overview of the data value ranges

Another...