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Indexing in nested loops
Every once in a while I run a nested loop like the following one.
for (i in 1:3) for (j in 1:4) print(paste(i, j))
Now if I want to save all the subsequent values in a vector I might do it like this.
res for (i in 1:3) for (j in 1:4) res[(i-1)*4 + j]
This is pretty tedious especially when more than two loops are nested. A simple though less efficient alternative is to use the append function.
res for (i in 1:3) for (j in 1:4) res
Subsequently re-calling a function that takes two arguments
Suppose we wanted to call a function that takes two arguments and use the results as a argument to the same function again. For example may want to sum up the values 1 to 5 Of course the function sum will do this for us, but what if this function didn’t exist? We might of course write:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5
But how do that in a single function call? Using do.call or the like will not work, as the function "+" takes two arguments.
do.call("+", list(1:5))
The trick is to use the function Reduce.
Reduce("+", 1:5) > 15
Evaluating an R command stored in a character string
From time to time, you may encounter situations where you have to evaluate a command which is stored in a character string. For example, let’s assume that we have the following variables:
name1 <- "Steve" name2 <- "Bill" value1 value2
Now, what would you do if you have to create a vector with entries whose value is stored in the variables value1 and value2 and entry names whose value is stored in the variables name1 and name2? You can write:
command command eval(parse(text=command))
Creating an empty dataframe with zero rows
Sometimes I want to fill up a dataframe from the frist row on. It might be useful do start off with a dataframe with zero rows for that purpose. The function numeric or character do the job. In case we wanted to specify a factor with predefined levels also factor may be useful.
data.frame(a=numeric(), b=numeric()) data.frame(a=numeric(), b=character(), c=factor(levels=1:10), stringsAsFactors=F)
… to be continued.
Tamas and Mark
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