Two things: It's just a guess as to what your problem is, but functions in R don't usually act on the object that is passed to them, but rather a copy thereof: if you want to keep the values calculated within the function, that's usually done with an assignment statement combined with the function call.
E.g. squaring <- function(x) {x^2} >z = 1:5 >squaring(z) >z [1] 1 2 3 4 5 > z = squaring(z) > z [1] 1 4 9 16 25 More generally, please provide code as requested in the posting guide. Hope this helps, Michael Weylandt On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 2:39 PM, DimmestLemming <nicoadams...@gmail.com>wrote: > I'm somewhat new to R, but I've had a lot of experience in Java. > > I'm working on a function that takes data from a data frame, does some math > and assigns the values to a vector. Pretty simple. I plan to merge the > vector with the data frame when I'm done. > > The vector is called offense1 (there will eventually be 2). I declared it > on > its own, outside of the function. Right now its values are the same as its > indices: 1, 2, 3... Then I plugged it into the function: getOffense1(1:20, > offense1). 1:20 is the range of offense1 that will be worked upon. > > Everything about the function works: It generates the correct values and > plugs them into the vector. I checked with print statements. The problem is > that when the function ends, offense1 is unchanged. All the values it takes > on are temporary. > > I thought it might be because the assignment (offense1[v] <- ___) happens > inside a for loop, but a call to > print( offense1[1:20] ) > just after the loop is finished turns out the right values. All that seems > to matter is whether it's inside the function or not. > > How can I assign values permanently to offense1? > > -- > View this message in context: > http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Function-won-t-permanently-assign-values-to-a-vector-tp3774850p3774850.html > Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.