Vectors

What are Vectors?

Vectors are the basic R data objects and there are 6 types of the atomic vectors. They can be

Integer,
Logical,
Double,
Complex,
Character and
Raw

Creation of Vector

There are two types of vector creation:

Single Element Vector
Multiple Elements Vector

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Single Element Vector

Whenever 1 word is written in R, it becomes a vector of length 1 and fits in one of the above vector types.

#Atomic vector of integer type
print(52L)
#Logical type
print(TRUE)

Output:

sol <- nchar("Counting number of
[1] 52      
[1] TRUE

Multiple Elements Vector

Using Colon operator with numeric data

This operator helps in a constant change over the numeric data with limits.

Example:

#Creating sequence
a<- 4:10
b<-2.2:4.2
print(a)
print(b)

Output:

[1] 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
[1] 2.2 3.2 4.2

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Using sequence(Seq.) operator

#Creating vector by incrementing by 0.2
print(seq(2, 3, by = 0.2))

Output:

[1]  2.0 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3.0

Accessing Vector Elements

Indexing helps access the elements of a vector. The[ ] brackets are used for indexing.

Indexing starts with number 1 position. A negative value in the index rejects that element from output. 0 and 1 or TRUE and FALSE can be used for indexing.

#accessing vector elements
x<- c("letter one", "letter two", "letter three", "four", "five", "six")
b<- x[c(1,3,6)]
print(b)
#Usage of  logical Index
d<- x[c(FALSE, FALSE,TRUE,TRUE,FALSE)] 
print(d)
#Using negative indexing
e<- x[c(-1,-2,-3,-4)]
print(e)

Output:

[1] "letter one" "letter three" "six"
[1] "letter three" "four"
[1] "five" "six"

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Vector Manipulation

Vector Arithmetic

Two vectors having the same length can do arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to get vector output.

Vector Element Recycling

When applying arithmetic operations to two vectors of unequal length, the elements of the shorter vector are recycled to complete the operations.

Example:

a <- c(2,4,6,8)
b <- c(3,8)
#b becomes c(3,8,3,8)
add.op <- a+b
print(add.op)

Output:

[1]  5  12  9  16

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Vector Element Sorting

Sorting of elements in a vector takes place in ascending or descending order. It can be either numbers or characters.

Example:

a <- c(2, 5, -6, 0) 
#sorting elements of vector
sort.sol <- sort(a)
print(sort.sol)
 
#sorting character vectors in decreasing order
b <- c("Blue", "Red", "Green")
revsort.sol <- sort(b, decreasing = TRUE)
print(revsort.sol)

Output: