[datatable-help] question on wide to long conversion

[chaceh]

I have a data table that I'd like to convert from wide to long. I know of 2
good ways to do this, either with melt() or reshape(). The problem is, my
first row (i.e. column names) are not easy to manipulate. here's a screen
shot of the data:

<http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/file/n4724572/Screen_Shot_2016-09-09_at_12.png> 

What I want to do, is create a column for the lake, year, ph, and SO4, so it
would look something like this:

Lake     year    pH     SO4
1          1976   4.59   6.5
1          1977   -9999 -9999
1          1978   4.48   7.3
1          1981   4.63   6
2          1976   4.97   5.5
and so on

because the column names are not the year, I'm not exactly sure how to melt
or reshape it to fit what I want. any suggestions? Thanks a lot for your
help



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