CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rif-statementmissing-data
looble
looble

Reputation: 13

Most parsimonious way to make R stopifnot() (or similar) evaluate to TRUE in two cases of NA?

Let's say I have some vectors:

> a=c(1:5, NA, 7:10)
> b=a
> a
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5 NA  7  8  9 10
> b
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5 NA  7  8  9 10

If I use the stopifnot() function, then this will generate the error, because of the NA values, but I would like it not to do so...

> stopifnot(a==b)
Error: a == b are not all TRUE
> a==b
 [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE   NA TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
>

I could modify my vectors so that I get the behaviour that I want

> a[is.na(a)]="missing"
> b[is.na(b)]="missing"
> a
 [1] "1"       "2"       "3"       "4"       "5"       "missing" "7"       "8"       "9"       "10"     
> b
 [1] "1"       "2"       "3"       "4"       "5"       "missing" "7"       "8"       "9"       "10"     
> stopifnot(a==b)
> a==b
 [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
>

But then I have the hassle of having to reset the "missing" values back to NA

> a[a=="missing"]=NA
> b[b=="missing"]=NA
> a
 [1] "1"  "2"  "3"  "4"  "5"  NA   "7"  "8"  "9"  "10"
> b
 [1] "1"  "2"  "3"  "4"  "5"  NA   "7"  "8"  "9"  "10"

And I have to reconvert the type, which is annoying

> typeof(a)
[1] "character"
> typeof(b)
[1] "character"
> a=as.numeric(a)
> b=as.numeric(b)
> a
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5 NA  7  8  9 10
> b
 [1]  1  2  3  4  5 NA  7  8  9 10

Is there a better way?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 206

Answers (1)

Roland
Roland

Reputation: 132706

Typically you would use identical or, in particular for floating point numbers, the less strict all.equal:

a <- c(1:5, NA, 7:10)
b <- a
stopifnot(isTRUE(all.equal(a, b)))
#no output

Upvotes: 1

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