jimhester / tibble

A modern re-imagining of the data frame

tibble

Overview

A tibble, or tbl_df, is a modern reimagining of the data.frame, keeping what time has proven to be effective, and throwing out what is not. Tibbles are data.frames that are lazy and surly: they do less (i.e. they don't change variable names or types, and don't do partial matching) and complain more (e.g. when a variable does not exist). This forces you to confront problems earlier, typically leading to cleaner, more expressive code. Tibbles also have an enhanced print() method which makes them easier to use with large datasets containing complex objects.

If you are new to tibbles, the best place to start is the tibbles chapter in R for data science.

Installation

# The easiest way to get tibble is to install the whole tidyverse:
install.packages("tidyverse")

# Alternatively, install just tibble:
install.packages("tibble")

# Or the the development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("tidyverse/tibble")

Usage

Create a tibble from an existing object with as_tibble():

library(tibble)
as_tibble(iris)
#> # A tibble: 150 x 5
#>    Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
#>           <dbl>       <dbl>        <dbl>       <dbl> <fct>  
#>  1         5.10        3.50         1.40       0.200 setosa 
#>  2         4.90        3.00         1.40       0.200 setosa 
#>  3         4.70        3.20         1.30       0.200 setosa 
#>  4         4.60        3.10         1.50       0.200 setosa 
#>  5         5.00        3.60         1.40       0.200 setosa 
#>  6         5.40        3.90         1.70       0.400 setosa 
#>  7         4.60        3.40         1.40       0.300 setosa 
#>  8         5.00        3.40         1.50       0.200 setosa 
#>  9         4.40        2.90         1.40       0.200 setosa 
#> 10         4.90        3.10         1.50       0.100 setosa 
#> # ... with 140 more rows

This will work for reasonable inputs that are already data.frames, lists, matrices, or tables.

You can also create a new tibble from column vectors with tibble():

tibble(x = 1:5, y = 1, z = x ^ 2 + y)
#> # A tibble: 5 x 3
#>       x     y     z
#>   <int> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1     1  1.00  2.00
#> 2     2  1.00  5.00
#> 3     3  1.00 10.0 
#> 4     4  1.00 17.0 
#> 5     5  1.00 26.0

tibble() does much less than data.frame(): it never changes the type of the inputs (e.g. it never converts strings to factors!), it never changes the names of variables, it only recycles inputs of length 1, and it never creates row.names(). You can read more about these features in the vignette, vignette("tibble").

You can define a tibble row-by-row with tribble():

tribble(
  ~x, ~y,  ~z,
  "a", 2,  3.6,
  "b", 1,  8.5
)
#> # A tibble: 2 x 3
#>   x         y     z
#>   <chr> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 a      2.00  3.60
#> 2 b      1.00  8.50