Tidying when multiple variables are stored as column values

Tidy datasets must have a single column for each variable. Occasionally, multiple variable names are placed in a single column with their corresponding value placed in another. The general format for this kind of messy data is as follows:

In this example, the first and last three rows represent two distinct observations that should each be rows. The data needs to be pivoted such that it ends up like this:

Getting ready

In this recipe, we identify the column containing the improperly structured variables and pivot it to create tidy data.

How to do it...

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