Paste multiple columns together?

Question

I have a bunch of columns in a dataframe which I want to paste together (seperated by "-") as follows: data <- data.frame('a' = 1:3, 'b' = c('a','b','c'), 'c' = c('d', 'e', 'f'), 'd' = c('g', 'h', 'i')) i.e. a b c d 1 a d g 2 b e h 3 c f i Which I want to become: a x 1 a-d-g 2 b-e-h 3 c-f-i I could normally do this with: within(data, x <- paste(b,c,d,sep='-')) and then removing the old columns, but unfortunately I do not know the names of the columns specifically, only a collective name for all of the columns, e.g. I would know that `cols <- c('b','c','d')` Does anyone know a way of doing this?

Answer 1

The function unite() in the tidyr package does exactly this.

https://tidyr.tidyverse.org/reference/unite.html

>tidyr::unite(data, col='newcolumn', sep='-', remove=TRUE)

newcolumn

1 1-a-d-g

2 2-b-e-h

3 3-c-f-i

>

If you have columns that you want to leave untouched, then you just need to add an array of the column names after the 'col' argument

>tidyr::unite(data, col='newcolumn', remove_these_cols, sep='-', remove=TRUE)