[Rd] seq_along and rep_along

Hadley Wickham hadley at rice.edu
Fri Jan 6 19:31:55 CET 2012


Hi all,

A couple of ideas for improving seq_along:

* It would be really useful to have a second argument dim:

    seq_along(mtcars, 1)
    seq_along(mtcars, 2)
    # equivalent to
    seq_len(dim(mtcars)[1])
    seq_len(dim(mtcars)[2])

  I often find myself wanting to iterate over the rows or column of a
data frame, and there isn't a particularly nice idiom if you want to
avoid problems with zeros - you have to use seq_len(nrow(df)) etc

* To me, it would seem be very natural to have a rep_along function:

  rep_along <- function(x, y) rep(x, length.out = length(y))

  possibly with more checking for the case where the lengths aren't
integer multiples.

I'd be happy to submit proposed implementations/documentation if there
was interest.

Hadley

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/



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