CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rduplicatesapply
Juliana Benitez
Juliana Benitez

Reputation: 83

Removing Adjacent Duplicates in Data Frame in R

This is my first question here at Stack Overflow. I have a data frame in R with over a hundred columns that is supposed to have duplicates. I can't use unique() because I only want to remove row-adjacent duplicates in each column.

L = list(c("AL", "AL", "AI", "AH", "BK", "CD", "CE", "BT", "BP", 
"BD", "BI", "AL"), c("AL", "AL", "AI", "AH", "BK", "AU", "BK", 
"CD", "V", "CE", "CE"), c("AL", "AL", "AI", "AH", "AU", "BK", 
"BQ"))
do.call(cbind, lapply(L, `length<-`, max(lengths(L))))

song 1  song 2  song 3
AL  AL  AL
AL  AL  AL
AI  AI  AI
AH  AH  AH
BK  BK  AU
CD  AU  BK
CE  BK  BQ
BT  CD  
BP  V   
BD  CE  
BI  CE  
AL      



song 1  song 2  song 3
AL  AL  AL
AI  AI  AI
AH  AH  AH
BK  BK  AU
CD  AU  BK
CE  BK  BQ
BT  CD  
BP  V   
BD  CE  
BI      
AL

I've seen previous answers that seems to work just fine for a single column.

The solution was

df = df[with(df, c(x[-1]!= x[-nrow(df)], TRUE)),]

I've seen rle solutions, but they don't work. Considering that the columns in my data frame have different lengths, I would like to know if there is a way to loop through all the columns.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 314

Answers (1)

Gregor Thomas
Gregor Thomas

Reputation: 145775

Let's say you have a list like this:

songs
# $song_1
# [1] "AL" "AL" "AI" "AH" "BK" "CD" "CE" "BT" "BP" "BD" "BI" "AL"
# 
# $song_2
# [1] "AL" "AL" "AI" "AH" "BK" "AU" "BK" "CD" "V"  "CE" "CE"
# 
# $song_3
# [1] "AL" "AL" "AI" "AH" "AU" "BK" "BQ"

Shared reproducibly with dput:

songs = structure(list(song_1 = c("AL", "AL", "AI", "AH", "BK", "CD", 
"CE", "BT", "BP", "BD", "BI", "AL"), song_2 = c("AL", "AL", "AI", 
"AH", "BK", "AU", "BK", "CD", "V", "CE", "CE"), song_3 = c("AL", 
"AL", "AI", "AH", "AU", "BK", "BQ")), .Names = c("song_1", "song_2", 
"song_3"))

You can de-dupe adjacent elements in a single list item similarly to the data frame method you have in your question.

with(songs, song_1[song_1[-1] != song_1[-length(song_1)]])
# [1] "AL" "AI" "AH" "BK" "CD" "CE" "BT" "BP" "BD" "BI"

To do this to all items in the list, we use lapply with an anonymous function:

lapply(songs, function(s) s[s[-1] != s[-length(s)]])
# $song_1
# [1] "AL" "AI" "AH" "BK" "CD" "CE" "BT" "BP" "BD" "BI"
# 
# $song_2
# [1] "AL" "AI" "AH" "BK" "AU" "BK" "CD" "V" 
# 
# $song_3
# [1] "AL" "AI" "AH" "AU" "BK"

You can, of course, assign the results of lapply to a new object to to overwrite the existing object.

Note that your data took a fair bit of work to get into R because of how you posted it. Next time, please use dput() or share code to create simulated data.

Upvotes: 1

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