CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
AlienDeg
AlienDeg

Reputation: 1339

Loops which repeat strings

I would like to write a loop which will help me to create a vector with strings. I have table with strings and number how many times each string should be repeated. 

     Rival Elements
1    ORL    3
2    MIA    4

So my code should create a vector, v = ORL, ORL, ORL, MIA, MIA, MIA, MIA

i <- 1
while (i <= 1) {
xx <- c(rep(qwe$Rival[i], qwe$Elements[i]))
i<- i+1
print(xx)
}

and instead of these xx = ORL, ORL, ORL, I received xx = 23,23,23. How to get string instead of these number?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 107

Answers (3)

MarkusN
MarkusN

Reputation: 3223

Column "Rival" in your dataframe is obviously defined as factor. applying function c() to a factor, results in the numeric representation of the factor levels, see:

c(qwe$Rival)

in this case use as.vector() instead. However, like Pascal commented the c()-function is unnecessary in your code.

To get rid of the loop, you get your vectors by using

xx = mapply(rep, qwe$Rival, qwe$Elements)

Upvotes: 0

Anders Ellern Bilgrau
Anders Ellern Bilgrau

Reputation: 10233

Is this what you want?

# Load your data
qwe <- read.table(stringsAsFactors = FALSE, text = "
Rival Elements
1    ORL    3
2    MIA    4 ")

#qwe$Rival <- as.character(qwe$Rival) # May or may not be needed
v <- with(qwe, rep(Rival, Elements))
print(v)
#[1] "ORL" "ORL" "ORL" "MIA" "MIA" "MIA" "MIA"

Make sure that qwe$Rival is a character.

Or do you want the following?

u <- paste(v, collapse = ", ")
print(u)
#[1] "ORL, ORL, ORL, MIA, MIA, MIA, MIA"

Which is a vector of length one with the element shown.

Upvotes: 1

Matthew Jackson
Matthew Jackson

Reputation: 309

At a first look your problem could be solved by using as.character().

Also you want <= 2 as R starts counting at 1, not 0.

Upvotes: 0

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