Skip to content

Subscripting Matrices

3 messages · Terrence Ireland, Gábor Csárdi, Marc Schwartz

#
There seems to be a result type difference when subscripting a 6 x 1 
matrix as compared to a 3 x 2 matrix that is caused by the ncol = 1 
compared to ncol > 1.

 > ThinMatrix <- matrix(1:6,ncol=1)
 > ThinMatrix
      [,1]
[1,]    1
[2,]    2
[3,]    3
[4,]    4
[5,]    5
[6,]    6
 > FatMatrix <- matrix(1:6,ncol=2)
 > FatMatrix
      [,1] [,2]
[1,]    1    4
[2,]    2    5
[3,]    3    6
 > dim(ThinMatrix[TRUE,])
NULL                                      #Though this value should be 6 1
 > dim(FatMatrix[TRUE,])
[1] 3 2

Thanks for your help.

Terry Ireland
#
You want `drop=FALSE`:
[1] 6 1
drop: For matrices and arrays.  If ?TRUE? the result is coerced to
          the lowest possible dimension (see the examples).  This only
          works for extracting elements, not for the replacement.  See
          ?drop? for further details.

And R inferno 8.1.44:
http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf

Gabor
On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 11:07 AM, Terrence Ireland <kyzyl at his.com> wrote:
#
On Aug 6, 2014, at 10:07 AM, Terrence Ireland <kyzyl at his.com> wrote:

            
Hi,

This question really should have gone to R-Help, not R-Devel and it is a FAQ:

  http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Why-do-my-matrices-lose-dimensions_003f
int [1:6] 1 2 3 4 5 6


Regards,

Marc Schwartz