tibble

A tibble (or tbl_df) is a modern reimagining of the R data.frame. It is designed to be "lazy and surly," meaning it performs fewer automatic transformations than a standard data.frame to help prevent silent errors:

• Does less: It does not change variable names or types, does not perform partial matching, and does not create row.names().
• Complains more: It will throw errors or warnings when a variable does not exist rather than attempting to guess.
• Enhanced printing: The print() method is optimized for large datasets and complex objects, showing column types and a concise summary.

If you are new to tibbles, the tibbles chapter in R for Data Science is the recommended starting point.

You can install tibble via CRAN or the development version from GitHub.

To install the entire tidyverse suite:

install.packages("tidyverse")

To install only the tibble package:

install.packages("tibble")

To install the development version from GitHub using pak:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("tidyverse/tibble")

install.packages("tibble")
# Or for development version:
pak::pak("tidyverse/tibble")

Use tibble() to create a new tibble from column vectors. Unlike data.frame(), tibble() follows stricter rules:

• It never changes the type of inputs (e.g., it preserves list columns).
• It never changes variable names.
• It only recycles inputs of length 1.
• It never creates row.names().

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

Use as_tibble() to convert existing objects (such as data.frame, list, matrix, or table) into a tibble format.

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

Use tribble() to define a tibble row-by-row, which is useful for manual data entry where the visual structure of the code matches the table structure. Use the tilde (~) prefix for column names.

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