Managing data in R
Before we start any serious programming in R, we need to learn how to import data into an R environment and which data types R supports. Often, for a particular analysis, we will not use the entire dataset. Therefore, we need to also learn how to select a subset of the data for any analysis. This section will cover these aspects.
Data Types in R
R has five basic data types as follows:
- Integer
- Numeric (real)
- Complex
- Character
- Logical (True/False)
The default representation of numbers in R is double precision real number (numeric). If you want an integer representation explicitly, you need to add the suffix L
. For example, simply entering 1
on the command prompt will store 1
as a numeric object. To store 1
as an integer, you need to enter 1L
. The command class(x)
will give the class (type) of the object x
. Therefore, entering class(1)
on command prompt will give the answer numeric
whereas entering class(1L)
will give the answer integer
.
R also has a special number Inf
that represents...