How do I keep strings in first column with tidyr::gather? - r

Question

This may be a very basic question about tidyr, which I just started learning, but I don't seem to find an answer after much searching in SO and Google.
Suppose I have a data frame:
mydf<- data.frame(name=c("Joe","Mary","Bob"),
jan=1:3,
feb=4:6,
mar=7:9,
apr=10:12)
which I want to reshape from wide to long. Before, I used melt, so:
library(reshape)
melt(mydf,id.vars = "name",measure.vars = colnames(mydf)[-1])
Which produces
name variable value
1 Joe jan 1
2 Mary jan 2
3 Bob jan 3
4 Joe feb 4
5 Mary feb 5
6 Bob feb 6
7 Joe mar 7
8 Mary mar 8
9 Bob mar 9
10 Joe apr 10
11 Mary apr 11
12 Bob apr 12
I wanted to use tidyr::gather, so I tried
gather(mydf,month,sales,jan:apr)
Which produces
name month sales
1 2 jan 1
2 3 jan 2
3 1 jan 3
4 2 feb 4
5 3 feb 5
6 1 feb 6
7 2 mar 7
8 3 mar 8
9 1 mar 9
10 2 apr 10
11 3 apr 11
12 1 apr 12
I'm lost here, as I haven't been able to keep the names in the first column.
What am I missing here?
######### EDIT TO ADD #######
> R.Version()$version.string
[1] "R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)"
> packageVersion("tidyr")
[1] ‘0.3.0’

Answer 1

It looks like in tidyr 0.3.0 you will need to convert the factor column name to character. I'm not sure why that has changed from version 0.2.0, where it worked without conversion to character. Nevertheless, here we go ...
gather(transform(mydf, name = as.character(name)), month, sales, jan:apr)
# name month sales
# 1 Joe jan 1
# 2 Mary jan 2
# 3 Bob jan 3
# 4 Joe feb 4
# 5 Mary feb 5
# 6 Bob feb 6
# 7 Joe mar 7
# 8 Mary mar 8
# 9 Bob mar 9
# 10 Joe apr 10
# 11 Mary apr 11
# 12 Bob apr 12
R.version.string
# [1] "R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)"
packageVersion("tidyr")
# [1] ‘0.3.0’
Credit to #aosmith for finding the closed github issue. You should be able to use the development version without issue now. To install the dev version, use
devtools::install_github(
"hadley/tidyr",
ref = "2e08772d154babcc97912bcae8b0b64b65b964ab"
)