To the best of my knowledge, you can't skip step #2, at least not with using much more complicated work-arounds like including a gsub() step within the call to table, and to everything else you do with those data.
Computers are generally better at dealing with normalized data, which is what you're constructing in step #2. Sarah On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:53 PM, John D. Muccigrosso <intern...@muccigrosso.org> wrote: > On Apr 6, 2012, at 9:09 AM, John D. Muccigrosso wrote: > >> I have some data files in which some fields have multiple values. For example >> >> first last sex major >> John Smith M ANTH >> Jane Doe F HIST,BIOL >> >> What's the best R-like way to handle these data (Jane's major in my >> example), so that I can do things like summarize the other fields by them >> (e.g., sex by major)? >> >> Right now I'm processing the files (in excel since they're spreadsheets) by >> duplicating lines with two values in the major field, eliminating one value >> per row. I suspect there's a nifty R way to do this. > > > I've gotten a few responses, for which I'm grateful, but either I don't quite > see how they answer my question, or I didn't phrase my question well, both of > which are equally possible. :-) > > So, given the data as above, let's call it "students", I have no problem > turning it into: > > first last sex major > John Smith M ANTH > Jane Doe F HIST > Jane Doe F BIOL > > What I then do with this is things like > > table(students$sex, students$major) > > So, three steps: > > 1. Get data with multiple values per field. > 2. Turn it into a data frame with only one value per field (by duplicating > lines). > 3. Do things like table(). > > I'd like to be able to skip #2. > > Thanks. > > John Muccigrosso > -- Sarah Goslee http://www.functionaldiversity.org ______________________________________________ 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.
