logical indexing requires the logical index to be of the same length as the vector being indexed. If it is not, then the index is wrapped to be of sufficient length. The result on line 3 is y[c(TRUE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE)] where the last TRUE was originally the first component of !is.na(y[1:3])
Grant Izmirlian, Ph.D. Mathematical Statistician izmir...@mail.nih.gov Delivery Address: 9609 Medical Center Dr, RM 5E130 Rockville MD 20850 Postal Address: BG 9609 RM 5E130 MSC 9789 9609 Medical Center Dr Bethesda, MD 20892-9789 ofc: 240-276-7025 cell: 240-888-7367 fax: 240-276-7845 ________________________________ From: David Goldsmith <eulergaussriem...@gmail.com> Sent: Saturday, March 9, 2019 8:36 PM To: r-help@r-project.org Subject: [R] Q re: logical indexing with is.na Hi! Newbie (self-)learning R using P. Dalgaard's "Intro Stats w/ R"; not new to statistics (have had grad-level courses and work experience in statistics) or vectorized programming syntax (have extensive experience with MatLab, Python/NumPy, and IDL, and even a smidgen--a long time ago--of experience w/ S-plus). In exploring the use of is.na in the context of logical indexing, I've come across the following puzzling-to-me result: > y; !is.na(y[1:3]); y[!is.na(y[1:3])] [1] 0.3534253 -1.6731597 NA -0.2079209 [1] TRUE TRUE FALSE [1] 0.3534253 -1.6731597 -0.2079209 As you can see, y is a four element vector, the third element of which is NA; the next line gives what I would expect--T T F--because the first two elements are not NA but the third element is. The third line is what confuses me: why is the result not the two element vector consisting of simply the first two elements of the vector (or, if vectorized indexing in R is implemented to return a vector the same length as the logical index vector, which appears to be the case, at least the first two elements and then either NA or NaN in the third slot, where the logical indexing vector is FALSE): why does the implementation "go looking" for an element whose index in the "original" vector, 4, is larger than BOTH the largest index specified in the inner-most subsetting index AND the size of the resulting indexing vector? (Note: at first I didn't even understand why the result wasn't simply 0.3534253 -1.6731597 NA but then I realized that the third logical index being FALSE, there was no reason for *any* element to be there; but if there is, due to some overriding rule regarding the length of the result relative to the length of the indexer, shouldn't it revert back to *something* that indicates the "FALSE"ness of that indexing element?) Thanks! DLG > sessionInfo() R version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20) Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit) Running under: macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Matrix products: default BLAS: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.5/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.5/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib locale: [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8 attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base other attached packages: [1] ISwR_2.0-7 loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] compiler_3.5.2 tools_3.5.2 [[alternative HTML version deleted]] [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.