Hello Richard, Since no one else has answered yet I'll venture a guess.
The following works on my little macbook... x <- as.factor(sapply(letters[1:26], function(x) paste(rep(x, 100000), collapse=""))) So each of the 26 factor levels in x has a string representation of 100,000 chars. So I'm *guessing* the limit is only that imposed by system memory. Hopefully if that's wrong it will provoke someone to correct me :) Michael On 27 September 2010 19:15, Richard Mott <rm...@well.ox.ac.uk> wrote: > Hi > > Is there a maximum length for the character string representing a level of a > factor? I have a set of several million variables, each a factor of length > 19. Each factor level is a character string which in some cases can be many > thousands of characters long. I am trying to find out why my analysis fails > - I just wanted to rule out the possibility that the internal factor > conversion has a problem parsing long strings. > > Thanks > > Richard > -- > ---------------------------------------------------- > Richard Mott | Wellcome Trust Centre > tel 01865 287588 | for Human Genetics > fax 01865 287697 | Roosevelt Drive, Oxford OX3 7BN > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
