[R] Removing and restoring factor levels (TYPO CORRECTED)

[Duncan Murdoch]

Sorry, a typo in my previous message (parens in the wrong place in the 
conversion).

Here it is corrected:

I'm doing a big slow computation, and profiling shows that it is
spending a lot of time in match(), apparently because I have code like

x %in% listofxvals

Both x and listofxvals are factors with the same levels, so I could
probably speed this up by stripping off the levels and just treating
them as integer vectors, then restoring the levels at the end.

What is the safest way to do this?  I am worried that at some point x
and listofxvals will *not* have the same levels, and the optimization
will give the wrong answer.  So I need code that guarantees they have
the same coding.

I think this works, where "master" is a factor with the master list of
levels (guaranteed to be a superset of the levels of x and listofxvals),
but can anyone spot anything that might go wrong?

# Strip the levels
x <- as.integer( factor(x, levels = levels(master) ) )

# Restore the levels
x <- structure( x, levels = levels(master), class = "factor" )

Thanks for any advice...

Duncan Murdoch