Warning: condition has length > 1

nawaf b wrote:

Hi -

I was wondering if anyone came across a problem such as mine! I was trying
to create a user-defined function, however, the results from calling the
function are unexpected!

When passing X parameter as a single value variable (x<-c(3)), everything
works fine. However, when passing a parameter as a vector with multiple
values (as the case in my code), the 'if condition' is only executed once!

Here is my code:

x

[1]  0.3  1.0  0.7 22.0

myfunction<-function(x)

+ {
+ if (x>=1) 0
+ else x^2
+ }

myfunction(x)

[1]   0.09   1.00   0.49 484.00
Warning message:
the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used in: if
(x >= 1) 0 else x^2 


Is there a way to overcome this issue? Can you please explain what
modifications to the code I need to accommodate to make it work.

I am going to go out on a limb here (I don't know much about R) but I'm 
not sure it has anything to do with that fact that you have defined a 
function.

It seems to me that "if (x > 1) {...}" expects a scalar and if x is not 
a scalar, it will use the first value.  To apply your function to each 
element, check out the help for sapply (eg ?sapply).  I am guessing the 
solution is something like sapply(x, myfunction) but don't quote me.

paul sorenson