Berend: No. The OP's "variables" appear to be vectors. sum() sums columnwise (vectorwise).
Something like rowSums(cbind(var1,var2,var3,var4,var6), na.rm=TRUE) appears to be what is wanted. But of course,Jin Choi appears to need to do some homework -- e.g. by reading the Introduction to R online manual to gain a better understanding of R's standard data structures. Cheers, Bert On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 10:06 PM, Berend Hasselman <b...@xs4all.nl> wrote: > > On 20-07-2013, at 06:37, Jin Choi <oohps...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I am having difficulty finding a solution to devising an R code to do the >> following: >> >> I have 5 numerical variables and I would like to create a new variable that >> is the sum of those 5 variables. However, there are many NA values >> throughout these 5 variables and everytime I run the following code >> >> new_variable=var1+var2+var3+var4+var5 >> >> I get NA as the sum whenever one of those 5 variables are NA. I cannot >> figure out a way to have new_variable represent the sum for only those >> values that are not NA. >> >> As an example, >> if var1=3 >> var2=3 >> var3=NA >> var4=NA >> var5=2 >> >> I would like new_variable to be 8 but I keep getting NA and I have >> unsuccessfully tried different methods to do so. I feel there is a simple >> method to solve my problem but I am unaware of such. I would appreciate any >> guidance! > > ?sum > > Have a look at the na.rm argument of sum. > > Berend > > ______________________________________________ > 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. -- Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics Internal Contact Info: Phone: 467-7374 Website: http://pharmadevelopment.roche.com/index/pdb/pdb-functional-groups/pdb-biostatistics/pdb-ncb-home.htm ______________________________________________ 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.
