r "slot" two columns into one (like a zip) - r

Question

Given two columns (perhaps from a data frame) of equal length N, how can I produce a column of length 2N with the odd entries from the first column and the even entries from the second column?
Suppose I have the following data frame
df.1 <- data.frame(X = LETTERS[1:10], Y = 2*(1:10)-1, Z = 2*(1:10))
How can I produce this data frame df.2?
i <- 1
j <- 0
XX <- NA
while (i <= 10){
XX[i+j] <- LETTERS[i]
XX[i+j+1]<- LETTERS[i]
i <- i+1
j <- i-1
}
df.2 <- data.frame(X.X = XX, Y.Z = c(1:20))

Answer 1

ggplot2 has an unexported function interleave which does this.
Whilst unexported it does have a help page (?ggplot2:::interleave)
with(df.1, ggplot2:::interleave(Y,Z))
## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Answer 2

If I understand you right, you want to create a new vector twice the length of the vectors X, Y and Z in your data frame and then want all the elements of X to occupy the odd indices of this new vector and all the elements of Y the even indices. If so, then the code below should do the trick:
foo<-vector(length=2*nrow(df.1), mode='character')
foo[seq(from = 1, to = 2*length(df.1$X), by=2)]<-as.character(df.1$X)
foo[seq(from = 2, to = 2*length(df.1$X), by=2)]<-df.1$Y
Note, I first create an empty vector foo of length 20, then fill it in with elements of df.1$X and df.1$Y.
Cheers,
Danny

Answer 3

You can use melt from reshape2:
library(reshape2)
foo <- melt(df.1, id.vars='X')
> foo
X variable value
1 A Y 1
2 B Y 3
3 C Y 5
4 D Y 7
5 E Y 9
6 F Y 11
7 G Y 13
8 H Y 15
9 I Y 17
10 J Y 19
11 A Z 2
12 B Z 4
13 C Z 6
14 D Z 8
15 E Z 10
16 F Z 12
17 G Z 14
18 H Z 16
19 I Z 18
20 J Z 20
Then you can sort and pick the columns you want:
foo[order(foo$X), c('X', 'value')]

Answer 4

Another solution using base R.
First index the character vector of the data.frame using the vector [1,1,2,2 ... 10,10] and store as X.X. Next, rbind the data.frame vectors Y & Z effectively "zipping" them and store in Y.X.
> res <- data.frame(
+ X.X = df.1$X[c(rbind(1:10, 1:10))],
+ Y.Z = c(rbind(df.1$Y, df.1$Z))
+ )
> head(res)
X.X Y.Z
1 A 1
2 A 2
3 B 3
4 B 4
5 C 5
6 C 6

Answer 5

A one two liner in base R:
test <- data.frame(X.X=df.1$X,Y.Z=unlist(df.1[c("Y","Z")]))
test[order(test$X.X),]

Answer 6

Assuming that you want what you asked for in the first paragraph, and the rest of what you posted is your attempt at solving it.
a=df.1[df.1$Y%%2>0,1:2]
b=df.1[df.1$Z%%2==0,c(1,3)]
names(a)=c("X.X","Y.Z")
names(b)=names(a)
df.2=rbind(a, b)
If you want to group them by X.X as shown in your example, you can do:
library(plyr)
arrange(df.2, X.X)