Unite multiple columns into one by pasting strings together

Convenience function to paste together multiple columns into one.

unite(data, col, ..., sep = "_", remove = TRUE, na.rm = FALSE)

Arguments

data

A data frame.

col

The name of the new column, as a string or symbol.

This argument is passed by expression and supports quasiquotation (you can unquote strings and symbols). The name is captured from the expression with rlang::ensym() (note that this kind of interface where symbols do not represent actual objects is now discouraged in the tidyverse; we support it here for backward compatibility).

...

<tidy-select> Columns to unite

sep

Separator to use between values.

remove

If TRUE, remove input columns from output data frame.

na.rm

If TRUE, missing values will be removed prior to uniting each value.

See also

separate(), the complement.

Examples

df <- expand_grid(x = c("a", NA), y = c("b", NA))
df
#> # A tibble: 4 × 2
#>   x     y    
#>   <chr> <chr>
#> 1 a     b    
#> 2 a     NA   
#> 3 NA    b    
#> 4 NA    NA   

df %>% unite("z", x:y, remove = FALSE)
#> # A tibble: 4 × 3
#>   z     x     y    
#>   <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 a_b   a     b    
#> 2 a_NA  a     NA   
#> 3 NA_b  NA    b    
#> 4 NA_NA NA    NA   
# To remove missing values:
df %>% unite("z", x:y, na.rm = TRUE, remove = FALSE)
#> # A tibble: 4 × 3
#>   z     x     y    
#>   <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 "a_b" a     b    
#> 2 "a"   a     NA   
#> 3 "b"   NA    b    
#> 4 ""    NA    NA   

# Separate is almost the complement of unite
df %>%
  unite("xy", x:y) %>%
  separate(xy, c("x", "y"))
#> # A tibble: 4 × 2
#>   x     y    
#>   <chr> <chr>
#> 1 a     b    
#> 2 a     NA   
#> 3 NA    b    
#> 4 NA    NA   
# (but note `x` and `y` contain now "NA" not NA)