tibble

Overview

Atibble, ortbl_df, is a modern reimagining of the data.frame, keeping what time has proven to be effective, and throwing out what is not. Tibbles are data.frames that are lazy and surly: they do less (i.e. they don’t change variable names or types, and don’t do partial matching) and complain more (e.g. when a variable does not exist). This forces you to confront problems earlier, typically leading to cleaner, more expressive code. Tibbles also have an enhancedprint() method which makes them easier to use with large datasets containing complex objects.

If you are new to tibbles, the best place to start is thetibbles chapter inR for data science.

Installation

# The easiest way to get tibble is to install the whole tidyverse:install.packages("tidyverse")# Alternatively, install just tibble:install.packages("tibble")# Or the the development version from GitHub:# install.packages("pak")pak::pak("tidyverse/tibble")

Usage

library(tibble)

Create a tibble from an existing object withas_tibble():

data<-data.frame(a=1:3, b=letters[1:3], c=Sys.Date()-1:3)data#>   a b          c#> 1 1 a 2025-06-18#> 2 2 b 2025-06-17#> 3 3 c 2025-06-16as_tibble(data)#># A tibble: 3 × 3#>abc#><int><chr><date>#>1     1 a     2025-06-18#>2     2 b     2025-06-17#>3     3 c     2025-06-16

This will work for reasonable inputs that are already data.frames, lists, matrices, or tables.

You can also create a new tibble from column vectors withtibble():

tibble(x=1:5, y=1, z=x^2+y)#># A tibble: 5 × 3#>xyz#><int><dbl><dbl>#>1     1     1     2#>2     2     1     5#>3     3     1    10#>4     4     1    17#>5     5     1    26

tibble() does much less thandata.frame(): it never changes the type of the inputs (e.g. it keeps list columns as is), it never changes the names of variables, it only recycles inputs of length 1, and it never createsrow.names(). You can read more about these features invignette("tibble").

You can define a tibble row-by-row withtribble():

tribble(~x,~y,~z,"a",2,3.6,"b",1,8.5)#># A tibble: 2 × 3#>xyz#><chr><dbl><dbl>#>1 a         2   3.6#>2 b         1   8.5

Related work

The tibble print method draws inspiration fromdata.table, andframe. Likedata.table::data.table(),tibble() doesn’t change column names and doesn’t use rownames.