CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rfor-loopif-statementvector
Jessica
Jessica

Reputation: 3

Delete empty elements in vector and create vector with only data

I have a vector that has empty elements and then some pieces of data in it that I can't predict the index of. I just want to delete all the empty elements and leave a vector with only the data. I can't just try to pull the indices with data because the amount of data can vary and show up at different indices (I'm extracting from a pdf).

I've tried to make a for loop that will check if an element isn't empty and then store it in a separate vector:

n <- 1
for (i in withspace) {
  if (withspace[[1]][i] != "") {
    wospace[n] <- withspace[[1]][i]
    n <- n + 1
  }
}

But I keep getting an error like this:

Error in if (withspace[[1]][i] != "") { : 
  missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed
In addition: Warning message:
In if (withspace[[1]][i] != "") { :
  the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used

withspace is the matrix storing all the data points and wospace is an initialized empty vector. This is what withspace looks like:

[[1]]
 [1] "City"      ""          ""          ""          ""          ""         
 [7] ""          ""          ""          ""          ""          ""         
[13] ""          ""          ""          ""          ""          ""         
[19] ""          " Province" ""          ""          ""          ""         
[25] ""          ""          ""          ""          ""          ""         
[31] ""          ""          ""          " Postal"

Is there a good way to do this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 235

Answers (1)

Jan
Jan

Reputation: 5254

I agree with Dave2e:

withspace[[1]][withspace[[1]] != ""]

should do the trick.

A few more observations:

  1. Your loop cycles through the vector elements of withspace[[1]] but within the loop you treat it as index. If you want an index, you need to define the loop as for (i in 1:length(withspace[[1]])).

  2. whithspace is clearly a list or data frame. The vector of interest, however, is withspace[[1]]. But in your loop, you loop through the top-level (list) elements. You have to set the loop as for (i in withspace[[1]]). In this case, withspace[[1]][i] does not make sense inside the loop. You have to address i directly which is an copy of the according element of withspace[[1]].

Upvotes: 2

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