Questions about working with a dataframe

-----Original Message-----
From: jacqueline.oehri at gmx.ch
Sent: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 16:25:59 +0200
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] Fwd: Questions about working with a dataframe

Dear R-Users,
I hope this is the right e-mail adress to post questions about
Programming in R, and I hope somebody of you can help me with the
troubles I have :)


1) First Question:

I have a dataframe called "WWA" (its attached to this e-mail
). It looks a little bit like the following one:


testcoordID testcommunity testaltitude     testSpeciesName
1      503146       Bournes        523.2     Bellis perennis
2      503146       Bournes        321.5 Cynosurus cristatus
3      557154       Bournes        654.1   Festuca pratensis
4      557154         Aigle        938.6     Bellis perennis
5      569226         Aigle        401.3     Bellis perennis
6      599246         Aigle        765.9   Prunella vulgaris

((I programmed this little one like this:
testcoordID
<-c(as.integer("503146"),as.integer("503146"),as.integer("557154"),as.integer("557154"),as.integer("569226"),as.integer("599246"))
testcommunity <-factor(c("Bournes","Bournes","Bournes", "Aigle",
"Aigle", "Aigle"))
testaltitude <- c(523.2,321.5,654.1,938.6,401.3,765.9)
testSpeciesName <-c( "Bellis perennis",
                     "Cynosurus cristatus",
                     "Festuca pratensis",
                    "Bellis perennis",
                    "Bellis perennis",
                     "Prunella vulgaris")
testframe <- data.frame(testcoordID,testcommunity,testaltitude,
testSpeciesName))



I needed to manipulate WWA in Excel, therefore i wrote
it as a text-file:

write.table(WWA, "WWA.txt", col.names=T, row.names=F, sep= ";", quote
=T)

Then I manipulated the WWA.txt in Excel and saved it as "noWWA.csv"(
) and re-importet it under the new name "oWWA" in R:

oWWA <- read.csv("~/Desktop/NCCR master projekt/BDM Beschreibungen/BDM
Daten/noWWA.csv", header=TRUE, sep=";")

What i need to do with this "WWA" or "oWWA"is finally to create a list
(or a dataframe but this is not possible i think), that shows for each
coordinateID ("testcoordID") the species Names occuring at this place:

species_per_coordID1<- tapply((WWA$speciesName), WWA$coordID, list)
species_per_coordID2 <- split(WWA$speciesName, WWA$coordID)

---> now my Question: This works very well with the WWA table, but not
with the oWWA!! I think i changed something in the dataframe by
converting it to a .txt file and than back to a .csv;
But does anybody know why it works with WWA and not with oWWA? how can I
treat the WWA dataframe in Excel without changing any format of it?


Thaanks a lot for any help or suggestions!!!!!

Have a nice day,

Kind regards Jacqueline