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unique: factor to string

3 messages · Markus Mühlbacher, Dimitris Rizopoulos, David Winsemius

#
Hi community,

I want to count the occurrence of values within a dataframe. 
data$names is a list of many names. With namelist <- unique(data$names) I get all the existing names. But the result is a factor, not a list of strings. 

I would then like to go trough all the names in a for-loop and count their occurrence. 

How do I make this?

Best regards,
Markus
#
do you mean you want:

table(data$names)


I hope it helps.

Best,
Dimitris
Markus M?hlbacher wrote:

  
    
#
On Jan 18, 2010, at 10:05 AM, Markus M?hlbacher wrote:

            
It's most likely a vector.
as.character(data$names)  # would be a character vector, i.e., a  
structure composed of "strings"
# You could make it a list if you wanted, but it's not clear that is  
needed for your purposes.
That shows your C programming background. Try instead the loop-less  
method:

table(data$names)

BTW using "names" for an object's name is not a good programing  
practice in R because there is a useful function by the same  
name.  ..... and then there is always the "dog" fortune.
-- 
David.