R help - Jul 2006 - Counting observations split by a factor when there are NA s in the data

Wouldn't something like table(status) give you want you want?  E.g.:

R> status <- factor(c("A", "B", "A", NA,
"A", "B"))
R> table(status)
status
A B 
3 2 


Andy 

From: Jenifer Larson-Hall
> 
> I am a very novice R user, a social scientist (linguist) who 
> is trying to learn to use R after being very familiar with 
> SPSS. Please be kind!
> 
> My concern:
> I cannot figure out a way to get an accurate count of 
> observations of one column of data split by a factor when 
> there are NAs in the data.
> 
> I know how to use commands like tapply and summaryBy to 
> obtain other summary statistics I am interested in, such as 
> the following:
> tapply(RLWTEST, list(STATUS), mean, na.rm=T) 
> summaryBy(RLWTEST~STATUS, data=lh.forgotten, FUN=c(mean, sd, 
> min, max),
> na.rm=T)
> 
> However, with tapply I know I cannot use length to get a 
> count where there are NAs. summaryBy appears to work the same 
> way. I do know how to get a count of the entire column using sum:
> sum(!is.na(lh.forgotten$RLWTEST))
> 
> However, this does not give me a count split up by my factor 
> (STATUS). I have looked through Daalgard (2002) and Verzani 
> (2005), and have searched the help files, but with no luck.
> 
> Thank you in advance for your help. I love R and am 
> interested in making it more accessible to social scientist 
> types like me. I know it can do everything SPSS can and more, 
> but sometimes the very simplest things seem to be a lot harder in R.
> 
> Jenifer
> 
> Dr. Jenifer Larson-Hall
> Assistant Professor of Linguistics
> University of North Texas
> (940)369-8950
> 
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