How do I change the way my data is organized? - r

Question

My data is currently organized in the following method (see first table below for actual data). I am only showing a portion of the overall data as the full image is quite large (over 100 rows).
Row September October November December January February March April May June July
1 Chino Hills Huntington Bea~ Fountain Valley Anaheim Fountain Vall~ Arcadia Anaheim Newport Be~ Santa Ana NA NA
2 Irvine Cerritos Long Beach Chino Hills Cerritos Anaheim NA Banning Newport Beach Anaheim NA
3 Glendale NA West Covina Monterey Park Encino NA Monterey Pa~ NA Los Angeles Cerritos Beverly Hi~
4 Norco Fountain Valley NA Monterey Park NA Long Beach NA Santa Ana Huntington Be~ Fountain Val~ NA
5 Los Angeles Inglewood West Covina Glendale NA Glendale NA Granada Hi~ Chino West Covina Tarzana
I want to change the way it is organized so that it shows the following. I want to emphasize that it would show all of the cities, not just the ones I have chosen to list. This is an incomplete diagram, but it gets the idea across:
+-------------+------------------+--------+----------+
| Chino Hills | Huntington Beach | Irvine | Glendale |
+-------------+------------------+--------+----------+
| Row 1 | Row 1 | Row 2 | Row 3 |
| Row 2 | | | Row 5 |
| | | | Row 5 |
+-------------+------------------+--------+----------+
I have tried tidyr::separate_rows(dfl, col), but this only works if the cities are in one cell; however, they are in multiple cells in multiple rows. This is what happens when I try the tidyr::separate_rows(dfl, col):
Row September October November December January February March April May June July
<chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
1 1 Chino Hills Huntington Bea~ Fountain Valley Anaheim Fountain Vall~ Arcadia Anaheim Newport Be~ Santa Ana NA NA
2 2 Irvine Cerritos Long Beach Chino Hills Cerritos Anaheim NA Banning Newport Beach Anaheim NA
3 3 Glendale NA West Covina Monterey Park Encino NA Monterey Pa~ NA Los Angeles Cerritos Beverly Hi~
4 4 Norco Fountain Valley NA Monterey Park NA Long Beach NA Santa Ana Huntington Be~ Fountain Val~ NA
5 5 Los Angeles Inglewood West Covina Glendale NA Glendale NA Granada Hi~ Chino West Covina Tarzana
As you can see, the only thing it does is add in another row of numbers which I do not need.
In summary, I need the Program R to find all of the cities and tell me what row they are in. The row may appear more than once if the city is in that row more than once. It will organize more than one column, not just the standard one column as used in tidyr. The number of columns will depend on the number of different cities.

Answer 1

We can get the data in long format, keep only unique values for each Row and value and get data in wide format. Assuming df is the dataframe name.
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
df %>%
pivot_longer(cols = -Row, values_drop_na = TRUE) %>%
distinct(Row, value) %>%
group_by(value) %>%
mutate(row = row_number()) %>%
pivot_wider(names_from = value, values_from = Row)