search for: tthing

...and therefore the matrix is not fully populated - empty cells are populated with '0's. Could someone please tell me how this may affect the result from the dist() command - because a '0' in a distance matrix means that the two variables are identical doesnt it(?) - but I dont want tthings clustered together simply because there was no information. Is this a problem and are there ways to circumnavigate them? Thanks [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

hi everyone : i'm not sure if my previous mail about this got sent. i was typing and erroneosuyl hit a button and lost what i was typing. anyway, i have the code below ( it works ) in which i run through the rows of a dataframe, taking out the first two fields which are characters strings ( with some extra spacing so i yuse gsub) and appending these character strings to a list so that i can