R help - May 2010 - Vector docs

Hi

The docs for R are very practical, which is quite refreshing compared to 
other languages, however I can't find any details about all the things I 
can do with a vector. I'm expecting methods like
vector.contains('foo')
and vector.remove('foo'), maybe those methods don't exist but
I'd love
to find a page that details the ones that do.

I'd also like to find some docs about foreach loops (unless there's a 
better way to iterate through a vector), I've only found mailing list posts.

Thanks

info at whywouldwe.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> The docs for R are very practical, which is quite refreshing compared to 
> other languages, however I can't find any details about all the things
I
> can do with a vector. I'm expecting methods like
vector.contains('foo')
> and vector.remove('foo'), maybe those methods don't exist but
I'd love
> to find a page that details the ones that do.
>
> I'd also like to find some docs about foreach loops (unless there's
a
> better way to iterate through a vector), I've only found mailing list
posts.
>
>   
There may be such a page somewhere, but it is probably incomplete.  The 
object model in R has methods owned by generics, not by classes.  So 
even if someone wrote a list of all methods that worked on vectors, 
someone else could add a new one without modifying the vector class.

You can ask R what methods are currently visible, e.g.

library(methods)
showMethods(classes="vector")

but it won't show methods in unattached packages.

Duncan Murdoch

On May 30, 2010, at 1:43 AM, info at whywouldwe.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> The docs for R are very practical, which is quite refreshing  
> compared to other languages, however I can't find any details about  
> all the things I can do with a vector. I'm expecting methods like  
> vector.contains('foo') and vector.remove('foo'), maybe
those methods
> don't exist but I'd love to find a page that details the ones that
do.
Since vectors may contain named elements, your request is ambiguous. I  
cannot tell whether "foo" is a name or a value. It's also
ambiguous
because it's not clear what vector.contains() is supposed to return.  
If you read the introductory material, you should find that the  
function "[" is fairly fundamental to R operations.

?"["
?which
?grep

 > x <- c(foo=3,bar=4)
 > x
foo bar
   3   4
 > x["foo"]
foo
   3
 > x[-"foo"]
Error in -"foo" : invalid argument to unary operator
# the negation operation on indices only works with numeric arguments
# grep and which provide numeric resutls that can be used for
"removal".
 > x[grep("foo", names(x))]
foo
   3
 > x[-grep("foo", names(x))]
bar
   4
 > x[which(names(x)=="foo")]
foo
   3

Minus operations on numeric indices perform removal, at least to the  
extent of what is returned, but indexing does not do destructive  
removal unless accompanied by "<-" . In fact "[<-" is
a function in
its own right.
>
> I'd also like to find some docs about foreach loops (unless there's
> a better way to iterate through a vector), I've only found mailing  
> list posts.
Indexed solution are preferred, so see above, but if you want to find  
the help page for the "for" function

?"Control"

>
--

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT