plyr

Lifecycle: retired CRAN status R-CMD-check Codecov test coverage

plyr is a set of tools for a common set of problems: you need to split up a big data structure into homogeneous pieces, apply a function to each piece and then combine all the results back together. For example, you might want to:

It’s already possible to do this with base R functions (like split and the apply family of functions), but plyr makes it all a bit easier with:

Considerable effort has been put into making plyr fast and memory efficient, and in many cases plyr is as fast as, or faster than, the built-in equivalents.

A detailed introduction to plyr has been published in JSS: “The Split-Apply-Combine Strategy for Data Analysis”, http://www.jstatsoft.org/v40/i01/. You can find out more at https://had.co.nz/plyr/, or track development at https://github.com/hadley/plyr. You can ask questions about plyr (and data manipulation in general) on the plyr mailing list. Sign up at https://groups.google.com/group/manipulatr.

Status Lifecycle: retired

plyr is retired: this means only changes necessary to keep it on CRAN will be made. We recommend using dplyr (for data frames) or purrr (for lists) instead.