This help topic is for R version 2.9.0. For the current version of R, try https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/base/html/rle.html
rle {base}R Documentation

Run Length Encoding

Description

Compute the lengths and values of runs of equal values in a vector – or the reverse operation.

Usage

rle(x)
inverse.rle(x, ...)

Arguments

x

an atomic vector for rle(); an object of class "rle" for inverse.rle().

...

further arguments which are ignored in R.

Details

Missing values are regarded as unequal to the previous value, even if that is also missing.

inverse.rle() is the inverse function of rle(), reconstructing x from the runs.

Value

rle() returns an object of class "rle" which is a list with components:

lengths

an integer vector containing the length of each run.

values

a vector of the same length as lengths with the corresponding values.

inverse.rle() returns an atomic vector.

Examples

x <- rev(rep(6:10, 1:5))
rle(x)
## lengths [1:5]  5 4 3 2 1
## values  [1:5] 10 9 8 7 6

z <- c(TRUE,TRUE,FALSE,FALSE,TRUE,FALSE,TRUE,TRUE,TRUE)
rle(z)
rle(as.character(z))

stopifnot(x == inverse.rle(rle(x)),
          z == inverse.rle(rle(z)))

[Package base version 2.9.0 ]