[R] Question on Counting Factors

[Daniel Gabrieli]

Hi,

I hope this is not too trivial, but I've had this recurring problem
and I think there is super easy solution, just not sure what it is.
Please see short example below.  I would like to get the frequency
(counts) of all the variables in a single column (that is easy), but I
would also like to return the value 0 for the absence of variables
defined in another column.

For example:

animals = matrix(c('cat','tiger','cat','tiger','fish','fish','dog','dog'),ncol=2,
byrow=F)

animals = as.data.frame(animals)

table(animals$V1)

# Returns the count for the variables in the first column as
cat tiger
   2     2

# But I would like to have table(animals$V1) return

cat tiger  dog  fish
   2     2    0      0


Any help is much appreciated.

Cheers,

Dan