[R] Unequal column lengths

[Jim Lemon]

Hi Tom,
What you want is a list rather than a data frame. So:

df<-read.table(text="  Dat1 Dat2 Dat3
 1    1    5    4
 2    7    7    9
 3    3    3    5
 4    2   NA  5
 5    9   NA NA",
 header=TRUE)
dflist<-as.list(df)
na.remove<-function(x) return(x[!is.na(x)])
sapply(dflist,na.remove)

Jim

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 7:33 AM, Tom Mosca <tom at vims.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I’ve tried several times to learn R, but have never gotten past a particular gate.  My data are organized by column in Excel, with column headers in the first row.  The columns are of unequal lengths.  I export them as CSV, then import the CSV file into R.  I wish to summarize the data by column.  R inserts NA for missing values, then refuses to operate on columns with NA.  R is importing my data into a data frame, and I realize that is inappropriate for what I want to do.
>
> How can I import my data so that I can work on columns of unequal length?  The first thing I would like to do is generate a table containing mean, median, mode, standard deviation, min, max and count, all per column.
>
> Thank you, Tom
>
> Example data
>   Dat1 Dat2 Dat3
> 1    1    5    4
> 2    7    7    9
> 3    3    3    5
> 4    2   NA  5
> 5    9   NA NA
>
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>
>
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