Dear folks-- The function below is a snippet of a larger function that is not doing what it is supposed to do, and I do not understand its behavior. The larger function is supposed to produce an array containing the results of a user-specified function applied to groups of data defined by the intersection of one or more factors, and return them in an array with a dimension for each factor and a dimension level for each factor level. This snippet is supposed to take a data frame, a vector of column numbers containing factors, and a column number for the data, and return (in the test function below, just print) a list of character vectors of the level names (one vector per dimension) and the length of those vectors.
It works fine so long as I give it more than one factor column, but if I give it a vector of factor columns of length 1, it behave differently and when I try to assign the names from test.levels to the dimnames of the array, I end up with an error message: Error in dimnames(data) <- dimnames : length of 'dimnames' [1] not equal to array extent The example below shows the function output for a test data frame (“test.df”) when run first of a vector of two column number for factors and then on just one. You can see how the structure of the output shifts. I can not understand what is happening. What I want it to do when given just factor cols =c(1) is to give me back exactly what it gives me bact for factor colum 1 in factor.cols = c(1,2). Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, andrewH # Test Data test.df <- data.frame(AA=rep(LETTERS[1:2], c(6,6)),BB=rep(LETTERS[3:5], c(4,4,4)), CC=rep(LETTERS[6:9],c(3,3,3,3)), DD=c(1:12)) # The function getLevels <- function(data.df, factor.cols, data.col){ test.levels <- sapply(test.df[,factor.cols, drop=F], levels) cat("test.levels:\n"); print(test.levels) no.levels <- sapply(sapply(data.df[,factor.cols, drop=F], levels), length) cat("no.levels:\n"); print(no.levels) } # Run it with two factors and again with 1, Output below cat("\nTest 2 factors:\n") getLevels(test.df, c(1,2), 4) cat("\nTest 1 factor:\n") getLevels(test.df, c(1), 4) Test 2 factors: > getLevels(test.df, c(1,2), 4) test.levels= $AA [1] "A" "B" $BB [1] "C" "D" "E" no.levels=AA BB 2 3 > cat("\nTest 1 factor:\n") Test 1 factor: > getLevels(test.df, c(1), 4) test.levels= AA [1,] "A" [2,] "B" no.levels=A B 1 1 -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Unexpected-behavior-of-extract-or-sapply-functions-tp3881176p3881176.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ 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.