NOTE: This is a toy package created for expository purposes, for the second edition of R Packages. It is not meant to actually be useful. If you want a package for factor handling, please see forcats.

foofactors

Factors are a very useful type of variable in R, but they can also be very aggravating. This package provides some helper functions for the care and feeding of factors.

Installation

You can install foofactors like so:

devtools::install_github("jennybc/foofactors")

Quick demo

Binding two factors via fbind():

library(foofactors)
a <- factor(c("character", "hits", "your", "eyeballs"))
b <- factor(c("but", "integer", "where it", "counts"))

Simply catenating two factors leads to a result that most don’t expect.

c(a, b)
#> [1] 1 3 4 2 1 3 4 2

The fbind() function glues two factors together and returns factor.

fbind(a, b)
#> [1] character hits      your      eyeballs  but       integer   where it 
#> [8] counts   
#> Levels: but character counts eyeballs hits integer where it your

Often we want a table of frequencies for the levels of a factor. The base table() function returns an object of class table, which can be inconvenient for downstream work.

set.seed(1234)
x <- factor(sample(letters[1:5], size = 100, replace = TRUE))
table(x)
#> x
#>  a  b  c  d  e 
#> 19 19 21 22 19

The fcount() function returns a frequency table as a tibble with a column of factor levels and another of frequencies:

fcount(x)
#> # A tibble: 5 x 2
#>   f         n
#>   <fct> <int>
#> 1 d        22
#> 2 c        21
#> 3 a        19
#> 4 b        19
#> 5 e        19