Hello everyone, I'm working through this book, *Humanities Data in R* (Arnold & Tilton), and I'm just having trouble understanding this maneuver.
In sum, I'm trying to combine data in two different data.frames. This data.frame is called fruitNutr Fruit Calories 1 banana 100 2 pear 100 3 mango 200 And this data.frame is called fruitData Fruit Color Shape Juice 1 apple red round 1 2 banana yellow oblong 0 3 pear green pear 0.5 4 orange orange round 1 5 kiwi green round 0 So, as you can see, these two data.frames overlap insofar as they both have banana and pear. So, what happens next is the book suggests this: fruitData$calories <- NA As a result, I've created a new column for the fruitData data.frame: Fruit Color Shape Juice Calories 1 apple red round 1 N/A 2 banana yellow oblong 0 N/A 3 pear green pear 0.5 N/A 4 orange orange round 1 N/A 5 kiwi green round 0 N/A Then: > index <- match (x=fruitData$Fruit, table=fruitNutr$Fruit) > index [1] NA 1 2 NA NA > is.na(index) [1] TRUE FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE > fruitData$Calories [!is.na(index)] <- fruitNutr$Calories[index[!is.na (index)]] > fruitData Fruit Color Shape Juice Calories 1 apple red round 1 N/A 2 banana yellow oblong 0 100 3 pear green pear 0.5 100 4 orange orange round 1 N/A 5 kiwi green round 0 N/A I get what the first part means, that first part being this: fruitData$Calories [!is.na(index)] go into the fruitData data.frame, specifically into the calories column, and only for what's true according to is.na(index). But I just literally can't understand this last part. fruitNutr$Calories[index[!is.na(index)]] Two questions. 1. I just literally don't understand how this code works. It does work, of course, but I don't know what it's doing, specifically this [index[! is.na(index)]] part. Could someone explain it to me like I'm five? I'm new at this... 2. And then: is there any other way to combine these two data.frames so that we get this same result? maybe an easier to understand method? That same result, again, is Fruit Color Shape Juice Calories 1 apple red round 1 N/A 2 banana yellow oblong 0 100 3 pear green pear 0.5 100 4 orange orange round 1 N/A 5 kiwi green round 0 N/A Drake [[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.