A tibble is a data frame in R that has a refined print method that only shows the first 10 rows of a data frame.

This makes it much easier to work with large data and prevents R from attempting to display every row if you accidently print a large data frame in the console.

However, occasionally you may want to convert a tibble to a data frame.

You can use the following syntax to do so:

my_df <- as.data.frame(my_tibble)

The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.

Example: Convert Tibble to Data Frame in R

Suppose we use the read_csv() function to read a CSV file into R:

library(tidyverse)

#import CSV file into tibble
my_tibble <- read_csv('my_data.csv')

#view tibble
print(my_tibble)

# A tibble: 7 x 3
  points assists rebounds
          
1     24       4        8
2     29       4        8
3     33       6        5
4     34       7        5
5     20       5        9
6     18       9       12
7     19      10       10
#view class
class(my_tibble)

[1] "spec_tbl_df" "tbl_df"      "tbl"         "data.frame" 

By default, the read_csv() function imports the CSV file as a tibble.

However, we can use the following syntax to convert this tibble to a data frame:

#convert tibble to data frame
my_df <- as.data.frame(my_tibble)

#view class of my_df
class(my_df)

[1] "data.frame"

We can see that the tibble has been successfully converted to a data frame.

We can also confirm that the data frame contains the exact same values as the tibble:

#view data frame
print(my_df)

  points assists rebounds
1     24       4        8
2     29       4        8
3     33       6        5
4     34       7        5
5     20       5        9
6     18       9       12
7     19      10       10

The values in the data frame are identical to those in the tibble.

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