Drop Labels from a Table

In tidyREDCap: Helper Functions for Working with 'REDCap' Data

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

library(tidyREDCap)

The Problem

The tidyREDCap package creates data sets with labelled columns.

tidyREDCap::import_instruments(
  url = "https://bbmc.ouhsc.edu/redcap/api/",
  token = Sys.getenv("REDCapR_test")
)

demographics <- structure(
  list(
    record_id = c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5),
    name_first = structure(
      c("Nutmeg", "Tumtum", "Marcus", "Trudy", "John Lee"),
      label = "First Name",
      class = c("labelled", "character")
    ), 
    name_last = structure(
      c("Nutmouse", "Nutmouse", "Wood", "DAG", "Walker"),
      label = "Last Name",
      class = c("labelled", "character")
    ),
    address = structure(
      c(
        "14 Rose Cottage St.\nKenning UK, 323232",
        "14 Rose Cottage Blvd.\nKenning UK 34243",
        "243 Hill St.\nGuthrie OK 73402",
        "342 Elm\nDuncanville TX, 75116",
        "Hotel Suite\nNew Orleans LA, 70115"
      ),
      label = "Street, City, State, ZIP",
      class = c("labelled", "character")
    ),
    telephone = structure(
      c(
        "[phone]",
        "[phone]",
        "[phone]",
        "[phone]",
        "[phone]"
      ),
      label = "Phone number",
      class = c("labelled", "character")
    ), email = structure(
      c(
        "[e-mail]",
        "[e-mail]",
        "[e-mail]",
        "[e-mail]",
        "[e-mail]"
      ),
      label = "E-mail",
      class = c("labelled", "character")
    ),
    dob = structure(
      c(12294, 12121, -13051, -6269, -5375),
      class = c("labelled", "Date"),
      label = "Date of birth"
    ),
    age = structure(
      c(11, 11, 80, 61, 59),
      label = "Age (years)",
      class = c("labelled", "numeric")
    ),
    sex = structure(
      c("Female", "Male", "Male", "Female", "Male"),
      label = "Gender",
      class = c("labelled", "character")
    ),
    demographics_complete = structure(
      c("Complete", "Complete", "Complete", "Complete", "Complete"),
      label = "Complete?...10",
      class = c("labelled", "character")
    )
  ),
  row.names = c(NA, -5L),
  class = "data.frame"
)

If you would like to see the labels on the data set demographics, you can use the RStudio function View(), as shown below.

View(demographics)

{width=90%}

However, some functions do not work well with labeled variables.

library(skimr)  # for the skim() function
demographics |> skim()

So you need a way to drop the label off of a variable or to drop all the labels from all the variables in a dataset.

The Solution

You can drop the label from a single variable with the drop_label() function. For example:

demographics_changed <- drop_label(demographics, "first_name")

You can drop all the labels using the drop_labels() function. For example:

demographics_without_labels <- drop_labels(demographics)

demographics_without_labels |> 
  skim()

tidyREDCap documentation built on May 31, 2023, 7:03 p.m.