# Data types

Data can have different “types”. The core data types in R are “logical” (true/false), “integer” (-1, 0, 1, etc), “numeric” or “double” (floating point numbers, a.k.a. decimals or real numbers), and “character” (strings). There is also “complex” type for complex numbers, but you have to go out of your way to find them.

A logical vector:

An integer vector: (you rarely need to specify these explicitly).

A numeric vector:

A character vector:

(even though they are called “characters”, there is no special type for single letters, etc. So people will refer to these as strings and characters fairly interchangeably).

Note that the strings must be quoted. You can use single or double quotes as you fancy, but be consistent. The difference between integer and numeric is subtle and can usually be ignored. To force numbers to be integers, you need to specify them with an “L” after, as above. Generally don’t worry about this.

It is possible to refer to TRUE and FALSE as T and F, and this practice is fairly widespread. Do not do it. The values TRUE and FALSE are special values are protected – they can never be overwritten:

Wheras the values T and F are just variables bound to the values TRUE and FALSE.

Do this at the top of of someone’s script and watch their world burn.

Some functions will work on any type, others will require specific types. For example, length will give the length for any vector

max will give the maximum value for a vector:

but sum requires a vector that is not a character vector:

How do you tell which of these types you have? Use the typeof function:

Note that the type of the number 1 is numeric:

Unless you ask nicely, all values in R are numeric and not integer. But this usually does not matter.

Note: this section actually grossly oversimplifies what is going on; see the difference between mode, storage.mode, class and typeof.

## Container data types

In R’s terminology, the types above are “atomic data types” as they cannot be subdivided any further. Data go into containers, which also have types.

The simplest of these is the vector, which we’ve already seen. A vector contains zero or more elements of a single atomic type. So you have a vector of integers, or a vector of characters, etc. You can’t have a mix of types within a vector.

Next simplest is a matrix. This is a two dimensional object with all elements being the same type. These can be constructed with the matrix function

Notice that the elements are added column-wise. A matrix is simply a vector that knows its dimension (in this case 2-by-3). You can do element-wise operators on a matrix:

A “list” is totally different to a vector, but is easily confused. A list can contain different types of data. So we can do:

This is a list of length ‘3’ with elements 1. a numeric vector of length 1 containing the element 1.5 2. a logical vector of length 2 containing the values TRUE and FALSE 3. a character vector of length 3 containing the elements “a”, “b”, and “c”.

A data.frame is actually a list internally, and many approaches for working with lists work with data.frames. Remember how length on a data.frame gave the number of columns? This is why.

## Factors vs. strings

By default, R reads in data.frames with things that look like text as “factors”

A factor is basically a vector of integers (1, 2, 3, …) with a small character vector that specifies how to translate these:

(unclass is a function that stops things behaving using special abilities — you won’t use it much!).

One of the most common issues that people have with factors is renaming elements.

Won’t work with factors:

Correct way:

Factors can be very useful, but can also be very annoying. To disable automatic conversion, use the stringsAsFactors argument to read.csv.

My strategy:

1. only use factors when you know they are needed, otherwise prefer character vectors.
2. delay conversion to factor as long as posible.

They do have uses though.

• Preserve ordering:

By default, ordering is alphabetical; gets confused when number of digits changes (“a10” sorts before “a9”).

In this data set, the plots are already in native order

We can pass that in as the levels argument to factor to get this ordering

which is preserved in functions that use factors

(this emphasises the “delay conversion” part of the strategy above).

• Factors are required for some analyses, and are needed to specify “constrasts” in some models.

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