Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:
> Dear R-Helpers,
>
> Why does R show character missing values in vectors as NA and when
> stored in a data frame as <NA>? I've searched but did not find an
> explanation.
>
> Thanks,
> Bob
>
>
>> gender <- c("f","f","f",NA,"m","m","m","m")
>> gender
>>
> [1] "f" "f" "f" NA "m" "m" "m" "m" #here it lacks brackets.
>
>> q1 <- c(1,2,2,3,4,5,5,4)
>> q1
>>
> [1] 1 2 2 3 4 5 5 4
>
>> myDF <- data.frame(q1,gender)
>> myDF
>>
> q1 gender
> 1 1 f
> 2 2 f
> 3 2 f
> 4 3 <NA> #here it has brackets.
> 5 4 m
> 6 5 m
> 7 5 m
> 8 4 m
>
It is actually a factor in the latter case
> data.frame(gender)$gender
[1] f f f <NA> m m m m
Levels: f m
However, you have the same effect with
> data.frame(gender,stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
gender
1 f
2 f
3 f
4 <NA>
5 m
6 m
7 m
8 m
The thing to notice is that the printing is without the quote character.
We also have
> noquote(gender)
[1] f f f <NA> m m m m
And the point in either case is that we need some way to distinguish
between NA (missing) and "NA" (New Alliance, Noradrenalin, North
America, Neil Armstrong, etc.)
--
O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
(*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FAX: (+45) 35327907
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