r - How to reshape data from long to wide format

Question

I'm having trouble rearranging the following data frame:

set.seed(45)
dat1 <- data.frame(
    name = rep(c("firstName", "secondName"), each=4),
    numbers = rep(1:4, 2),
    value = rnorm(8)
    )

dat1
       name  numbers      value
1  firstName       1  0.3407997
2  firstName       2 -0.7033403
3  firstName       3 -0.3795377
4  firstName       4 -0.7460474
5 secondName       1 -0.8981073
6 secondName       2 -0.3347941
7 secondName       3 -0.5013782
8 secondName       4 -0.1745357

I want to reshape it so that each unique "name" variable is a rowname, with the "values" as observations along that row and the "numbers" as colnames. Sort of like this:

     name          1          2          3         4
1  firstName  0.3407997 -0.7033403 -0.3795377 -0.7460474
5 secondName -0.8981073 -0.3347941 -0.5013782 -0.1745357

I've looked at melt and cast and a few other things, but none seem to do the job.

Answer 1

Using reshape function:

reshape(dat1, idvar = "name", timevar = "numbers", direction = "wide")