[R] Selectively swapping labels between factors

[Charles C. Berry]

On Sat, 27 Oct 2007, Michael Kubovy wrote:

> Dear R-helpers,
>
> I'm trying to selectively swap labels between two factors, depending
> on an indicator variable i.
>
> Can you point me to a solution, and perhaps how I could have found it?
>
> labels(fact1) is a character vector of r row numbers

 	labels( object, ... )

is a generic function. See ?labels

I do not know of any method (e.g. 'methods( labels )' ) that returns a 
character vector of 'row numbers'. So, this is either your own method, a 
function that masks base:::labels(), or a misstatement about what labels() 
does.

> levels(fact1) is a character vector of the n < r unique levels
> How do I then get the character vector of length r of the levels of
> fact1?

 	as.character( fact1 )


> Once I have that, is there anything else I need to know about
> swapping labels between factors in a df?
>

Would a 'df' be a data.frame object?

Do you mean swapping 'levels'? There is no 'labels' attribute of a factor 
in a data.frame or elsewhere.

If you mean to swap elements of two vectors that happen to be factors, the 
path of least resistance and confusion is likely to convert both to 
character vectors, perform the changes, then convert both to factors, and 
finally replace the orignals with the new versions.

Chuck


> _____________________________
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Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
                                             Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	            UC San Diego
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