Convert Data Frame to Array in R (Example)

In this article you’ll learn how to save data frames in an array object in R programming.

Table of contents:

It’s time to dive into the example:

Creation of Example Data

The following data is used as a basis for this R programming tutorial:

data1 <- data.frame(x1 = 1:5,                # Create first data frame
                    x2 = 5:1)
data1                                        # Print first data frame

data2 <- data.frame(x1 = 11:15,              # Create second data frame
                    x2 = 15:11)
data2                                        # Print second data frame

In Tables 1 and 2 it is shown that we have created two data frames containing the same row and column names, but different values.

Let’s put these data frames into an array!

Example: Save Data Frames in Array Object Using array() Function

This example explains how to create an array based on two input data frames in the R programming language.

For this task, we can use the array, c, unlist, list, rownames, and colnames functions as shown below:

my_array <- array(data = c(unlist(data1),    # Convert data frames to array
                           unlist(data2)),
                  dim = c(5, 2, 2), 
                  dimnames = list(rownames(data1),
                                  colnames(data1)))
my_array                                     # Print array
# , , 1
# 
#   x1 x2
# 1  1  5
# 2  2  4
# 3  3  3
# 4  4  2
# 5  5  1
# 
# , , 2
# 
#   x1 x2
# 1 11 15
# 2 12 14
# 3 13 13
# 4 14 12
# 5 15 11

As you can see, the previous R syntax has created a new array called my_array that contains our two input data frames.

Video & Further Resources

Would you like to learn more about the conversion of data frames to an array object? Then I recommend having a look at the following video on my YouTube channel. I show the R programming syntax of this article in the video:

In addition, you might read some of the other tutorials on this website:

• Convert Array to Data Frame in R
• Convert Column Classes of Data Table
• Convert Nested Lists to Data Frame or Matrix
• Convert Named Vector to Data Frame
• Convert Data Frame Columns to List Elements
• Introduction to R

You have learned in this article how to convert, transform, and reshape a data frame to an array in the R programming language. If you have additional questions, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments.