Collapse / concatenate / aggregate a column to a single comma separated string within each group

by

Here are some options using toString, a function that concatenates a vector of strings using comma and space to separate components. If you don’t want commas, you can use paste() with the collapse argument instead.

data.table 

# alternative using data.table
library(data.table)
as.data.table(data)[, toString(C), by = list(A, B)]

aggregate This uses no packages:

# alternative using aggregate from the stats package in the core of R
aggregate(C ~., data, toString)

sqldf

And here is an alternative using the SQL function group_concat using the sqldf package :

library(sqldf)
sqldf("select A, B, group_concat(C) C from data group by A, B", method = "raw")

dplyr A dplyr alternative:

library(dplyr)
data %>%
  group_by(A, B) %>%
  summarise(test = toString(C)) %>%
  ungroup()

plyr

# plyr
library(plyr)
ddply(data, .(A,B), summarize, C = toString(C))

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