
I actually prefer to do this portion of the work (data prep) inside of excel.  When you export the data as an cvs doc the NA's will be in the excel spreadsheet.  Now the search and/or the search and replace option become very handy.  Probably a better way in [R] though.
 
Tyler

 
> Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:35:20 -0700
> From: jwiley.psych@gmail.com
> To: ritacarreira@hotmail.com
> CC: r-help@r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] How do I delete multiple blank variables from a data frame?
> 
> Hi Rita,
> 
> This is far from the most efficient or elegant way, but:
> 
> ## two column data frame, one all NAs
> d <- data.frame(1:10, NA)
> ## use apply to create logical vector and subset d
> d[, apply(d, 2, function(x) !all(is.na(x)))]
> 
> I am just apply()ing to each column (the 2) of d, the function
> !all(is.na(x)) which will return FALSE if all of x is missing and TRUE
> otherwise. The result is a logical vector the same length as the
> number of columns in d that is used to subset only the d columns with
> at least some non-missing values. For documentation see:
> 
> ?apply
> ?is.na
> ?all
> ?"["
> ?Logic
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Josh
> 
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Rita Carreira <ritacarreira@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dear List Members,I have 55 data frames, each of which with 272 variables and 267 observations. Some of these variables are blanks but the blanks are not the same for every data frame. I would like to write a procedure in which I import a data frame, see which variables are blank, and delete those variables. My data frames have variables named P1 to P136 and Q1 to Q136.
> > I have a couple of questions regarding this issue:
> > 1) Is a loop an efficient way to address this problem? If not, what are my alternatives and how do I implement them?2) I have been playing with a single data frame to try to figure out a way of having R go through the columns and see which ones it should delete. I have figured out how to delete rows with missing data (newdata <- na.omit(olddata)) but how do I do it for columns???
> > Thank you very much for your help and have a great weekend!
> > Rita ________________________________________ "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance"--Derek Bok
> >
> >
> >
> >        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
> > ______________________________________________
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> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Joshua Wiley
> Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
> University of California, Los Angeles
> http://www.joshuawiley.com/
> 
> ______________________________________________
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
 		 	   		  
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