How do I create a table of value-frequency combinations arranged vertically in R

Question

How do I create a table of value-frequency combinations arranged vertically,

> df = data.frame(fruit=c("apple", "banana", "cherry", "cherry", "apple", "banana", "apple", "date"));
> table(df$fruit)

 apple banana cherry   date 
     3      2      2      1

So far so good. But I'd like something that's like this (e.g. to basic manipulations and subsetting of values based on the frequency):

Fruit   Freq
"apple"   3
"banana"  2
"cherry"  2
"date"    1

In SQL, that'd be SELECT fruit, COUNT(*) AS Freq FROM df GROUP BY fruit, and would yield a table that's like the starting point to this question: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/15574/how-to-convert-a-frequency-table-into-a-vector-of-values

Is there an easy way to do that in R? (Alternatively, does this indicate a mindset that's too 'SQL' and not enough 'R'?)

Answer 1

data.frame(table(df))
#       df Freq
# 1  apple    3
# 2 banana    2
# 3 cherry    2
# 4   date    1

Or perhaps

setNames(data.frame(table(df)), c("Fruit", "Freq"))
#    Fruit Freq
# 1  apple    3
# 2 banana    2
# 3 cherry    2
# 4   date    1

Answer 2

Using just base R, you can just convert it to a matrix which will be column oriented with the values as the row.names.

as.matrix(table(df))