[R] a problem with table() and duplicates

[Simone Gabbriellini]

Dear List,

I have a data.frame like this:

name religion neighbor religion.neighbor
pippo a minnie a
pluto a mickey a
paperino b donald a
paperino b minnie b

when I table(dataframe$religion) my data.frame, I get
a b
2 2

of course, "paperino" is cited twice but should be counted once. Is
there anything I can do in order to keep the data.frame the way it is
but tell R to count values once if they are repeated?

the point is that each row represent a relation, thus I cannot simply
remove duplicates...

any help more than welcome!

Best regards,
Simone