On Apr 27, 2009, at 8:16 PM, J Toll wrote:
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:42 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net
> wrote:
Using str(data) would have been more informative.
"data" it turns out is a dataframe with a single column. which is a
factor
with rownames. Not the most typical of constructions, but the
authors must
have had their reasons ....
data$Value[row.names(data)=="Float"]
# [1] 1.30B
# 52 Levels: -1.00% -11.40% -18.69% -38.03% 0.04% 0.78 06-Feb-09 09-
Mar-09
... NA
# ... or to get rid of those annoying factor levels...
as.character(data[row.names(data)=="Float", ] )
# [1] "1.30B"
Thank you. I was in the middle of trying to respond to your first
post when I got your second containing the answer.
My problem is that I didn't understand the structure of the data and I
couldn't figure out the relationship of the row names to the data so I
was trying everything under the sun, yet nothing was yielding the
results I wanted.
On my own, I was able to retrieve the data using:
d.ibm$Value[38]
[1] 1.30B
52 Levels: -1.00% -11.40% -18.69% -38.03% 0.04% 0.78 06-Feb-09
09-Mar-09 1.176 1.30% 1.30B 1.32B 1.40% 1.7 10.304 100.84B ... NA
But that seemed too brittle to be used reliably. I wanted a way to
get to the data using what I now know to be the row name. I'm sorry
my initial question was so vague/uninformative. Through brute force,
I had tried dozens of different ways to coax out the information I
needed. What I really needed was a better understanding of the data
structure.
And this construction using indexing might be more natural:
> data["Float", ]
[1] 1.30B
52 Levels: -1.00% -11.40% -18.69% -38.03% 0.04% 0.78 06-Feb-09 09-
Mar-09 ... NA
> as.character( data["Float", ] )
[1] "1.30B"
(I never have understood the attraction of factors. But there are a
great many things I do not understand.)
David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT
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