Thank you Brian for your clear and informative answer. I was (obviously!) unaware of this and appreciate the response.
Best, Bert Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics (650) 467-7374 "Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge is certainly not wisdom." H. Gilbert Welch On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 8:53 AM, Prof Brian Ripley <rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote: > On 08/01/2014 16:23, Bert Gunter wrote: >> >> Is the following a bug? >> ##(R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25) >> ## Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)) >> >> >> d <- data.frame(a=rep(letters[1:3],4:6)) >> rle(d$a) >> ##Error in rle(d$a) : 'x' must be an atomic vector >> >> is.atomic(d$a) >> ##[1] TRUE > > > But > >> is.vector(d$a) > [1] FALSE > > The discrepancies in what a 'vector' is in R are very long standing, but a > factor is not a vector. > > >> rle(c(d$a)) > > > That loses the class and other attributes, giving a vector. > >> ## Run Length Encoding >> ## lengths: int [1:3] 4 5 6 >> ## values : int [1:3] 1 2 3 >> >> Cheers, >> Bert >> >> Bert Gunter >> Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics >> (650) 467-7374 > > > > -- > Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk > Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ > University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) > 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) > Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ 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.
