Today I was struggling with a relatively simple operation: unnest() from the tidyr package. What it’s supposed to do is pretty simple. When you have a data.frame where one or multiple columns are lists, you can unlist these columns while duplicating the information in other columns if the length of an element is larger than 1.
library(tibble) df <- tibble( a = LETTERS[1:5], b = LETTERS[6:10], list_column = list(c(LETTERS[1:5]), "F", "G", "H", "I") ) df ## # A tibble: 5 x 3 ## a b list_column ## <chr> <chr> <list> ## 1 A F <chr [5]> ## 2 B G <chr [1]> ## 3 C H <chr [1]> ## 4 D I <chr [1]> ## 5 E J <chr [1]> library(tidyr) unnest(df, list_column) ## # A tibble: 9 x 3 ## a b list_column ## <chr> <chr> <chr> ## 1 A F A ## 2 A F B ## 3 A F C ## 4 A F D ## 5 A F E ## 6 B G F ## 7 C H G ## 8 D I H ## 9 E J I I came across this a lot while working on data from Twitter since individual tweets can contain multiple hashtags, mentions, URLs and so on, which is why they are stored in lists.