apologies on the garbled posting, and thanks for the responses.  This was
perfect.  Just to close the thread for others, here was my example data set:

a<-c(NA,"China",NA,"Japan",NA,NA)
b<-c("Honduras",NA,"Sudan",NA,"Mexico","Mexico")
dfrm<-cbind(a,b)

David's code was as follows:

dfrm$b[is.na(dfrm$b)] <- dfrm$a[is.na(dfrm$b)]

this works great.  Thanks to you both



On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 4:52 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net>wrote:

>
> On Sep 2, 2011, at 3:51 PM, Josh Tewksbury wrote:
>
>  Hello, I have a dataframe that looks like this:
>>
>>  a b  NA Honduras  China NA  NA Sudan  Japan NA  NA Mexico  NA Mexico
>> I would like to replace the NA values in column b with the non-NA values
>> in
>> column a.  I have tried a number of techniques, (if, ifelse) but I must
>> have
>> the logic wrong.
>>
>
> Mangled data but no matter:
>
> dfrm$b[is.na(dfrm$b)] <- dfrm$a[is.na(dfrm$b)]
>
> (Learn to post in plain text. This is a plain text list.)
>
>
> David Winsemius, MD
> West Hartford, CT
>
>


-- 
Joshua J. Tewksbury
Walker Professor of Natural History,
Department of Biology, University of Washington
106 Kincaid Hall, Box 351800
Seattle WA 98195-1800
my lab and office are in 528 Kincaid Hall
cell phone 206/331-1893,
office phone: 206/616-2129
lab phone: 206/616-2132,
fax: 206/616-2011
website: http://faculty.washington.edu/tewksjj/index.html

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