[R] line up a matrix

[John Fox]

Dear Tord,


At 02:32 PM 1/4/2002 +0100, Tord Snall wrote:

>I try to rearrange my ref. database (now in Excel!! :(  ) for importing it
>into a reference manager program (RIS format).
>
>My file basically look like this [3,4]-matrix:
>
>rbind(c("a", "b", "c", "d"), c("e", "f", "g", "h"), c("i", "j", "k", "l"))
>      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
>[1,] "a"  "b"  "c"  "d"
>[2,] "e"  "f"  "g"  "h"
>[3,] "i"  "j"  "k"  "l"
>
>and I have tried to find a function to line up the matrix into a vector
>which I would like to look like this:
>
>t(c("a", "b", "c", "d","e", "f", "g", "h","i", "j", "k", "l"))
>
>Is there any R function for available for that?

Matrices are stored column-wise, so try

         > mat <- rbind(c("a", "b", "c", "d"), c("e", "f", "g", "h"), 
c("i", "j", "k", "l"))
         > as.vector(t(mat))
         [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l"

If you really want a one-column matrix, as your question seems to imply, 
you could use

     > matrix(t(mat), ncol=1)
         [,1]
     [1,] "a"
     [2,] "b"
     [3,] "c"
     [4,] "d"
     [5,] "e"
     [6,] "f"
     [7,] "g"
     [8,] "h"
     [9,] "i"
     [10,] "j"
     [11,] "k"
     [12,] "l"

I hope that this helps,
  John


-----------------------------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M4
email: jfox at mcmaster.ca
phone: 905-525-9140x23604
web: www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox
-----------------------------------------------------

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