Chapter 3. An Introduction to Data Processing in R

In this chapter, basic techniques to fulfill the reorganization of data (cleaning, processing, and so on) will be covered. These will be the key factors while developing web applications with R and Shiny because, unlike traditional web application commercial software, they provide the possibility of performing any operation on your data and consequently, displaying it in the exact way that was imagined with no boundaries. By presenting several useful tools, this chapter will help the reader to gain skills in data manipulation.

The chapter is divided into the following seven sections:

• Sorting elements
• Basic summary functions
• grep and regular expressions
• The apply-like functions
• The plyr package
• The data.table package
• The reshape2 package