How do I sum up certain rows with different values but keep all rows on certain columns the same and then collapse this into one line?

Question

For example I have the data frame:

firstname  lastname  season  attempts   yards  weight
bob        smith      2018      7         38     200
bob        smith      2018      11        56     200
bob        smith      2018      17        88     200
bob        smith      2018      8         24     200

And I want to condense this into one line that reads:

firstname  lastname  season  attempts   yards  weight
bob        smith      2018     43        206    200

Answer 1

We can use aggregate from base R. Use the formula method, specify the columns to sum as a matrix on the lhs of ~ and . represents all the other columns used as grouping. Specify the aggregating function - sum

aggregate(cbind(attempts, yards) ~ ., df1, sum)

-output

   firstname lastname season weight attempts yards
1       bob    smith   2018    200       43   206

---

Or in tidyverse, group across columns other than 'attempts', 'yards', and summarise across all other (everything()) and get the sum

library(dplyr)
df1 %>% 
    group_by(across(-c(attempts, yards))) %>% 
    summarise(across(everything(), sum),  .groups = 'drop') %>%
    select(names(df1))

-outupt

# A tibble: 1 x 6
  firstname lastname season attempts yards weight
  <chr>     <chr>     <int>    <int> <int>  <int>
1 bob       smith      2018       43   206    200

data

df1 <- structure(list(firstname = c("bob", "bob", "bob", "bob"), 
    lastname = c("smith", 
"smith", "smith", "smith"), season = c(2018L, 2018L, 2018L, 2018L
), attempts = c(7L, 11L, 17L, 8L), yards = c(38L, 56L, 88L, 24L
), weight = c(200L, 200L, 200L, 200L)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, 
-4L))