[R] "each" argument in rep (Bug?)

[Phil Spector]

In what way is the behavior non-consistent?  Quoting from
the help page for rep:

‘times’ A vector giving the number of times to repeat each
               element if of length ‘length(x)’, or to repeat the whole
               vector if of length 1.

‘each’ non-negative integer.  Each element of ‘x’ is repeated
               ‘each’ times.  Treated as ‘1’ if ‘NA’ or invalid.

So while times may be a vector, each is clearly limited to being an
integer.  I'll admit that it would be nice if it told you that it
was only using the first element of a vector each argument, but the
behaviour is perfectly consistent with the documentation.

 					- Phil Spector
 					 Statistical Computing Facility
 					 Department of Statistics
 					 UC Berkeley
 					 spector at stat.berkeley.edu



On Tue, 1 Feb 2011, T.D. Rudolph wrote:

>
> I have a vector of unique elements that I want to replicate a variable number
> of times depending on the element (lengths all > 800).  However I noticed
> that the resulting length was not the sum of the each argument.  The
> following example demonstrates this.
>
> I am confused as to why this works:
>
> rep(1:4, c(2,1,2,1))
> [1] 1 1 2 3 3 4
>
> but this doesn't:
>
> rep(1:3, each=c(2,1,2))
> [1] 1 1 2 2 3 3
>
> This does not appear to be consistent with the description provided in
> ?rep....
> Is this supposed to be happening?
> -- 
> View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/each-argument-in-rep-Bug-tp3253050p3253050.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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