Hi!
Thanks for this explanation and pointing me to value section of the documention and the function duplicate. Indeed the documentation entry in the value section states:
An object of the same type of 'x'. but if an element is equal to one with a smaller index, it is removed. Could have found it by myself.
/E
Tony Plate wrote:
AFAIK, it has always worked that way in S-plus and R. Furthermore, the documentation in R for 'unique' says that it removes duplicated elements. This does seem to leave the possibility that element other than the first of a set of duplicates is retained, which could mess up the order. However, the documentation for 'duplicated' is clearer: it says that 'duplicated' identifies duplicates of earlier elements. Also in the examples for 'duplicated', it says that x[!duplicated(x)] == unique(x) (paraphrased).
I depend on this all the time, so I also checked some references. In the Blue book the documentation for the functions unique and duplicated is combined and implies the above. In MASS 4th Ed, the page referred to by the index entry for 'unique' (p48, #9 in my copy) states that 'unique' removes duplicates as identified by 'duplicated', which implies that the order of retained elements is not changed. The Green book has no index entry for 'unique'. In S-plus the implementation of unique.default(x) uses x[!duplicated(x)].
So, I think the evidence is pretty strong that unique(x) will always return elements in the same order as they first appear in x. But it would be nice if the documentation for 'unique' explicitly stated that this is the behavior for all methods. (It does state this for the array method for 'unique').
-- Tony Plate
At Wednesday 09:17 AM 9/29/2004, Witold Eryk Wolski wrote:
Hi,
Is the ordering of the values returned something on what I can rely on, a form of a standard, that a function called unique in R (in futher versions) will return the uniq elements in order of they first occurcence.
> x<-c(2,2,1,2) > unique(x) [1] 2 1
Its seems not to be the standard. E.g. matlab >> x=[2,2,1,2] x = 2 2 1 2 >> unique(x) ans = 1 2
I just noted it because, the way how it is working now is extremely usefull for some applications (e.g tree traversal), so i use it in a script. But I am a little woried if I can rely on this behaviour in further versions. And furthermore can I assume that someone reading the code will think that it works in that way?
Or is it better to define a additional function?
keeporderunique<-function(x)
{
res<-rep(NA,length(unique(x))
count<-0
for(i in x)
{
if(!i%in%res)
{
count<-count+1
res[count]<-i
}
}
res
}
/E
-- Dipl. bio-chem. Witold Eryk Wolski MPI-Moleculare Genetic Ihnestrasse 63-73 14195 Berlin _ tel: 0049-30-83875219 'v' http://www.molgen.mpg.de/~wolski / \ mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---W-W---- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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--
Dipl. bio-chem. Witold Eryk Wolski MPI-Moleculare Genetic
Ihnestrasse 63-73 14195 Berlin _
tel: 0049-30-83875219 'v'
http://www.molgen.mpg.de/~wolski / \
mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---W-W----
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
