[R] How to group by then count?

[Christian Brandstätter]

Dear Monnad,

one possible way would be to use as.factor() and in the summary you would get counts for every level.

Like this:

  x = c("1", "1", "2", "1", "5", "2")

summary(as.factor(x))

Cheers, Christian


> Hi all,
>
> I thought this was a very naive problem but I have not found any solution
> which is idiomatic to R.
>
> The problem is like this:
>
> Assuming we have vector of strings:
>   x = c("1", "1", "2", "1", "5", "2")
>
> We want to count number of appearance of each string. i.e. in vector x,
> string "1" appears 3 times; "2" appears twice and "5" appears once. Then I
> want to know which string is the majority. In this case, it is "1".
>
> For imperative languages like C, C++ Java and python, I would use a hash
> table to count each strings where keys are the strings and values are the
> number of appearance. For functional languages like clojure, there're
> higher order functions like group-by.
>
> However, for R, I can hardly find a good solution to this simple problem. I
> found a hash package, which implements hash table. However, installing a
> package simple for a hash table is really annoying for me. I did find
> aggregate and other functions which operates on data frames. But in my
> case, it is a simple vector. Converting it to a data frame may be not
> desirable. (Or is it?)
>
> Could anyone suggest me an idiomatic way of doing such job in R? I would be
> appreciate for your help!
>
> -Monnand
>
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>
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