Apologies for the cross-posting, but I thought this snippet of info
might be vaguely interesting to both lists.
I did a ***brief*** search to see if this issue had previously been
discussed and found nothing. So I thought I'd tell the list about a
difference in behaviour between unique() in R and unique() in Splus
which bit me just now.
I was trying to convert a package from Splus to R and got nonsense
answers in R. Turned out that within the bowels of the package I was
doing something like
u <- unique(y)
where y was a matrix of integer values. In Splus this gives a
(short) vector of unique values. In R it gives a matrix of the same
dimensionality as y, except that any duplicated rows are eliminated.
(This looks like being very useful --- once you know about it. And
it was probably mentioned in the R release notes at one time, but, as
Dr. Hook says, ``I was stoned and I missed it.'')
E.g.
set.seed(42)
m <- matrix(sample(1:5,20,TRUE),5,4)
u <- unique(m)
In R ``u'' is identical to ``m''; in Splus ``u'' is
vector (of
length 5).
To get what I want in R I simply need to do
u <- unique(as.vector(y))
Simple, once you know. Took me a devil of a long time to track down
what was going wrong, but!
cheers,
Rolf Turner