R: Data Frames

data.frame {base}

R Documentation

Data Frames

Description

This function creates data frames, tightly coupled collections of variables which share many of the properties of matrices and of lists, used as the fundamental data structure by most of R's modeling software.

Usage

data.frame(..., row.names = NULL, check.rows = FALSE,
           check.names = TRUE,
           stringsAsFactors = default.stringsAsFactors())

default.stringsAsFactors()

Arguments

...

these arguments are of either the form value or tag = value. Component names are created based on the tag (if present) or the deparsed argument itself.

row.names

NULL or a single integer or character string specifying a column to be used as row names, or a character or integer vector giving the row names for the data frame.

check.rows

if TRUE then the rows are checked for consistency of length and names.

check.names

logical. If TRUE then the names of the variables in the data frame are checked to ensure that they are syntactically valid variable names and are not duplicated. If necessary they are adjusted (by make.names) so that they are.

stringsAsFactors

logical: should character vectors be converted to factors?

Details

A data frame is a list of variables of the same length with unique row names, given class "data.frame". If there are zero variables, the row names determine the number of rows.

data.frame converts each of its arguments to a data frame by calling as.data.frame(optional=TRUE). As that is a generic function, methods can be written to change the behaviour of arguments according to their classes: R comes with many such methods. Character variables passed to data.frame are converted to factor columns unless protected by I. If a list or data frame or matrix is passed to data.frame it is as if each component or column had been passed as a separate argument.

Objects passed to data.frame should have the same number of rows, but atomic vectors, factors and character vectors protected by I will be recycled a whole number of times if necessary.

If row names are not supplied in the call to data.frame, the row names are taken from the first component that has suitable names, for example a named vector or a matrix with rownames or a data frame. (If that component is subsequently recycled, the names are discarded with a warning.) If row.names was supplied as NULL or no suitable component was found the row names are the integer sequence starting at one (and such row names are considered to be ‘automatic’, and not preserved by as.matrix).

If row names are supplied of length one and the data frame has a single row, the row.names is taken to specify the row names and not a column (by name or number).

Names are removed from vector inputs not protected by I.

default.stringsAsFactors is a utility that takes getOption("stringsAsFactors") and ensures the result is TRUE or FALSE.

Value

A data frame, a matrix-like structure whose columns may be of differing types (numeric, logical, factor and character and so on).

Note

In versions of R prior to 2.4.0 row.names had to be character: to ensure compatibility with earlier versions of R, supply a character vector as the row.names argument.

References

Chambers, J. M. (1992) Data for models. Chapter 3 of Statistical Models in S eds J. M. Chambers and T. J. Hastie, Wadsworth \& Brooks/Cole.

Examples

L3 <- LETTERS[1:3]
(d <- data.frame(cbind(x=1, y=1:10), fac=sample(L3, 10, repl=TRUE)))

## The same with automatic column names:
data.frame(cbind(  1,   1:10),     sample(L3, 10, repl=TRUE))

is.data.frame(d)

## do not convert to factor, using I() :
(dd <- cbind(d, char = I(letters[1:10])))
rbind(class=sapply(dd, class), mode=sapply(dd, mode))

stopifnot(1:10 == row.names(d))# {coercion}

(d0  <- d[, FALSE]) # NULL data frame with 10 rows
(d.0 <- d[FALSE, ]) # <0 rows> data frame  (3 cols)
(d00 <- d0[FALSE,])  # NULL data frame with 0 rows

[Package base version 2.5.0 ]