extdplyr is an extension package for data manipulation
based on dplyr and tidyr.
If dplyr is a grammar for data manipulation,
extdplyr is like a short paragraph written in
dplyr. extdplyr extends dplyr and
tidyr verbs to some common “routines” that manipulate
datasets. It uses a similar interface and preserves all features from
the underlying dplyr functions like their fast performance
and a variety of data backends.
dplyr is powerful but also restrained in that it aims to
provide the most important tools, but not to suit every needs. After
several years of extensive use of dplyr, I found that some
combinations of dplyr verbs become too frequent in my code
that I wanted to extract them as functions. This is the origin of those
routines in extdplyr.
Also there are some cases where the operations don’t conform to
dplyr’s rules. Naturally one wouldn’t expect these
operations to be included into dplyr, but they can be
implemented here for the occasional use.