transpose rows to columns change in data format (Summary of advice received)

["dorothy pang" <dorothy44@hotmail.com>]

Dear all

I have received advice from Sundar and Petr on my queries, thanks a lot to 
both of you.
The advice is summarized as follows

My query:
> > I have a dataset which has the following format, and I would like to 
> > transpose records of patients having more than one diagnosis type from 
> > rows having a number of diagnosis into columns of diagnosis type in S-plus 
> > version 6.
> > A complication is that I don't know how many diagnosis types in the data 
> > (which is very huge) and new data which comes in may have a greater number 
> > of diagnosis type which I need to convert into columns, hence I hope to 
> > get a generic programming to do this.
> > Format of data x:
> > Name        Diagnosis    Type
> > Ang Poh Oh    2506        diag1
> > Ang Poh Oh    4652        diag2
> > Ang Poh Oh    2510        diag3
> > Ang Poh Oh    2516        diag4
> > Toh Yu Mei    4502        diag1
> > Owen Low    4560        diag1
> > Owen Low    4565        diag2
> > Owen Low    8460        diag3
> > Format of data which I am trying to obtain:
> >
> > Name        Type1        Type2        Type3        Type4
> > Ang Poh Oh    2506        4652        2510        2516
> > Toh Yu Mei         4502
> > Owen Low                    4560        4565        8460
Solution
> > reShape(x$Diagnosis, id = x$Name, colvar = x$Type)
>            diag1 diag2 diag3 diag4
> Ang Poh Oh  2506  4652  2510  2516
>   Owen Low  4560  4565  8460    NA
> Toh Yu Mei  4502    NA    NA    NA
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