Skip to content

Unexpected behavior of '[' in an apply instruction

6 messages · robin hankin, Rui Barradas, Serguei Sokol +1 more

#
Hello,

This came up in this StackOverflow post [1].

If x is an array with n dimensions, how to subset by just one dimension?
If n is known, it's simple, add the required number of commas in their 
proper places.
But what if the user doesn't know the value of n?

The example below has n = 3, and subsets by the 1st dim. The apply loop 
solves the problem as expected but note that the index i has length(i) > 1.


x <- array(1:60, dim = c(10, 2, 3))

d <- 1L
i <- 1:5
apply(x, MARGIN = -d, '[', i)
x[i, , ]


If length(i) == 1, argument drop = FALSE doesn't work as I expected it 
to work, only the other way does:


i <- 1L
apply(x, MARGIN = -d, '[', i, drop = FALSE)
x[i, , drop = FALSE]


What am I missing?

[1] 
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66168564/is-there-a-native-r-syntax-to-extract-rows-of-an-array

Thanks in advance,

Rui Barradas
#
Rui
(I don't see this on stackoverflow; should I post this there too?)  Most of
the magic package is devoted to handling arrays of arbitrary dimensions and
this functionality might be good to include if anyone would find it useful.

HTH

Robin


<hankin.robin at gmail.com>
On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 12:26 AM Rui Barradas <ruipbarradas at sapo.pt> wrote:

            

  
  
#
Hello,

Yes, although there is an accepted solution, I believe you should post 
this solution there. It's a base R solution, what the question asks for.

And thanks, I would have never reminded myself of slice.index.

Rui Barradas

?s 20:45 de 12/02/21, robin hankin escreveu:
#
Le 12/02/2021 ? 22:23, Rui Barradas a ?crit?:
There is another approach -- produce a call to `[`() putting there 
"required number of commas in their proper places" programmatically. 
Even if it does not lead to a very readable expression, I think it 
merits to be mentioned.

 ? x <- array(1:60, dim = c(10, 2, 3))
 ? ld=length(dim(x))
 ? i=1 # i.e. the first row but can be a slice 1:5, whatever
 ? do.call(`[`, c(alist(x, i), alist(,)[rep(1,ld-1)], alist(drop=FALSE)))

Best,
Serguei.
#
Le 12/02/2021 ? 23:49, Sokol Serguei a ?crit?:
Or slightly shorter:

 ? do.call(`[`, alist(x, i, ,drop=FALSE)[c(1,2,rep(3,ld-1),4)])
#
Just to be different, the premise was that you do not know how many dimensions the array had. But that is easily available using dim() including how many items are in each dimension. So, in principle, you can use a normal indexing method perhaps in a loop to get what you want. Not sexy but doable. You can treat the array x as a vector just like lower level R does and access the contents using the formula it uses.

-----Original Message-----
From: R-devel <r-devel-bounces at r-project.org> On Behalf Of Sokol Serguei
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2021 5:50 PM
To: r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] Unexpected behavior of '[' in an apply instruction

Le 12/02/2021 ? 22:23, Rui Barradas a ?crit :
There is another approach -- produce a call to `[`() putting there "required number of commas in their proper places" programmatically. 
Even if it does not lead to a very readable expression, I think it merits to be mentioned.

   x <- array(1:60, dim = c(10, 2, 3))
   ld=length(dim(x))
   i=1 # i.e. the first row but can be a slice 1:5, whatever
   do.call(`[`, c(alist(x, i), alist(,)[rep(1,ld-1)], alist(drop=FALSE)))

Best,
Serguei.
______________________________________________
R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel