Length of data.frame column - R-help

Thu, Oct 13, 2011 10:49 PM #

I have a related question...I have a data frame similar with 74 rows that I
created with "header=TRUE", but when I try to coerce one of the data frame
columns into a vector, it shows up as having length 1, even though when I
print it, it shows 74 elements:

[28] 1 1 3 3 3 2 4 3 2 3 4 3 3 3 3 4 3 2 3 2 3 1 2 1 2 3 1
[55] 0 3 2 4 3 1 2 3 1 1 1 4 3 2 1 2 3 3 3 2

[1] 1

On the other hand, I can easily coerce the row names to a vector of length
74

[1] 74

What I would like to do is make VAL into a vector with length 74 instead of
length 1 so I can sort it using use "partf" as factors.  I tried
"as.vector", but it doesn't let you specify the length.  Any ideas?  Thanks,
and sorry if I'm being unclear or stupid, I'm a newbie :)

Logan

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Jeff Newmiller

Thu, Oct 13, 2011 11:41 PM #

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jawbonemurphy

Thu, Oct 13, 2011 11:46 PM #

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PIKAL Petr

Fri, Oct 14, 2011 2:11 AM #

Hi

that I

frame

your VAL is still data frame. See ?"[" and link to data.frame method. Use 

str(object) 

to see the structure of your object not just printing it to console as 
print is a function which has also different methods for different objects 
and does not inform you about nature of your object.

You shall profit from reading R-intro which I believe you have overlooked. 
It shall be installed in doc/manual directory of your R installation.

Regards
Petr

length

of

Thanks,

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David Winsemius

Fri, Oct 14, 2011 5:43 AM #

On Oct 14, 2011, at 5:11 AM, Petr PIKAL wrote:

Or at least a list. The "c" function stripped its attributes:

 > str( c( data.frame(a=1:10) ) )
List of 1
  $ a: int [1:10] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Which also is an explanation for why its length is still reported as 1.

One might think that as.vector might be able to extract a vector from  
a list if length 1 but one would be wrong and should then got to :

?unlist

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT