Factors are a very useful type of variable in R, but they can also drive you nuts. Especially the “stealth factor” that you think of as character.
Can we soften some of their sharp edges?
Binding two factors via fbind():
a <- factor(c("character", "hits", "your", "eyeballs"))
b <- factor(c("but", "integer", "where it", "counts"))Simply catenating two factors leads to a result that most don’t expect.
c(a, b)## [1] 1 3 4 2 1 3 4 2The fbind() function glues two factors together and returns factor.
cbind(a, b)## a b
## [1,] 1 1
## [2,] 3 3
## [3,] 4 4
## [4,] 2 2Often we want a table of frequencies for the levels of a factor. The base table() function returns an object of class table, which can be inconvenient for downstream work. Processing with as.data.frame() can be helpful but it’s a bit clunky.
set.seed(1234)
x <- factor(sample(letters[1:5], size = 100, replace = TRUE))
table(x)## x
## a b c d e
## 25 26 17 17 15as.data.frame(table(x))## x Freq
## 1 a 25
## 2 b 26
## 3 c 17
## 4 d 17
## 5 e 15The freq_out() function returns a frequency table as a well-named tbl_df:
cat(123)## 123