How to aggregate categorical data in R?

Question

I have a dataframe which consists of two columns with categorical variables (Better, Similar, Worse). I would like to come up with a table which counts the number of times that these categories appear in the two columns. The dataframe I am using is as follows:

       Category.x  Category.y
1      Better      Better
2      Better      Better
3      Similar     Similar
4      Worse       Similar

I would like to come up with a table like this:

           Category.x    Category.y
Better     2             2
Similar    1             2
Worse      1             0

How would you go about it?

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comments, table is standard for this, like

table(stack(DT))

         ind
values    Category.x Category.y
  Better           2          2
  Similar          1          2
  Worse            1          0

or

table(value = unlist(DT), cat = names(DT)[col(DT)])

         cat
value     Category.x Category.y
  Better           2          2
  Similar          1          2
  Worse            1          0

or

with(reshape(DT, direction = "long", varying = 1:2), 
  table(value = Category, cat = time)
)

         cat
value     x y
  Better  2 2
  Similar 1 2
  Worse   1 0

Answer 2

sapply(df1, function(x) sapply(unique(unlist(df1)), function(y) sum(y == x)))
#        Category.x Category.y
#Better           2          2
#Similar          1          2
#Worse            1          0