How can I gather different columns into one in R?

Question

I have some geographical data that kinda looks like this:

name	x1	x2	x3	x4	y1	y2	y3	y4
Mark	5	2	1	2	0	3	2	5
Amy	0	5	1	5	0	3	2	5

And I would like to transform it into something like this to graph it easier on ggplot:

name	x	y
Mark	5	0
Mark	2	3
Mark	1	2
Mark	2	5
Amy	0	0
Amy	5	3
Amy	1	2
Amy	5	5

I have tried the function gather() without any success. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

It should be easier with pivot_longer which is a successor of gather.

tidyr::pivot_longer(df, 
                    cols = -name, 
                    names_to = '.value', 
                    names_pattern = '([a-z])\\d+')

#  name      x     y
#  <chr> <int> <int>
#1 Mark      5     0
#2 Mark      2     3
#3 Mark      1     2
#4 Mark      2     5
#5 Amy       0     0
#6 Amy       5     3
#7 Amy       1     2
#8 Amy       5     5