[R] Using table to get frequencies of several factors at once

[Pancho Mulongeni]

Hi, I have a dataframe with n columns, but I am only looking at five of them. And lots of rows, over 700. 
So I would like to find frequencies for each of the numeric columns (variables) using the table function. However, is there a fast way to produce a frequency table where the 5 rows represent the 5 numeric variables and the columns refer to the values (levels) of the respective numeric variables, which in this case are 0 and 1.  
The only way I have figured it out is via a for loop:
m<-seq(218,222,1) #these are columns of the variables in the larger dataframe
tm<-m[1:5] #I need this for the for loop
l.tm<-length(tm)
B<-matrix(nrow=l.tm,ncol=2)  #the matrix to hold the freqs
for (p in 1:l.tm) {
var.num<-m[p]
B[p,]<-table(DATA[,var.num])
}

> B
     [,1] [,2]
[1,]  697    9
[2,]  512  194
[3,]  604  102
[4,]  700    6
[5,]  706  706
So the rows represent my five variables (columns) that occupy columns 218 through 222 in the DATA dataframe.
So the second column represents my frequencies of the value 1, which is what I am interested in. The last row has a double entry, because there was only one value, 0, with a freq of 706 and so R duplicated in the two columns, but that's ok, I can just ignore it. 

So is there are better way to do this? Is there a way to use the so called tapply function? I struggle to understand the help doc for this.function.


Pancho Mulongeni
Research Assistant
PharmAccess Foundation
1 Fouché Street
Windhoek West
Windhoek
Namibia
 
Tel:   +264 61 419 000
Fax:  +264 61 419 001/2
Mob: +264 81 4456 286