README.md

NOTE: This is a toy package created for expository purposes. It is not meant to actually be useful. If you want a package for factor handling, please see forcats.

foofactors

Factors are a very useful type of variable in R, but they can also drive you nuts. This package provides some helper functions for the care and feeding of factors.

Installation

devtools::install_github("schignel/foofactors")

Quick demo

Binding two factors via fbind():

library(foofactors)
a <- factor(c("character", "hits", "your", "eyeballs"))
b <- factor(c("but", "integer", "where it", "counts"))

Simply catenating two factors leads to a result that most don't expect.

c(a, b)
#> [1] 1 3 4 2 1 3 4 2

The fbind() function glues two factors together and returns factor.

fbind(a, b)
#> [1] character hits      your      eyeballs  but       integer   where it 
#> [8] counts   
#> Levels: but character counts eyeballs hits integer where it your

Often we want a table of frequencies for the levels of a factor. The base table() function returns an object of class table, which can be inconvenient for downstream work. Processing with as.data.frame() can be helpful but it's a bit clunky.

set.seed(1234)
x <- factor(sample(letters[1:5], size = 100, replace = TRUE))
table(x)
#> x
#>  a  b  c  d  e 
#> 25 26 17 17 15
as.data.frame(table(x))
#>   x Freq
#> 1 a   25
#> 2 b   26
#> 3 c   17
#> 4 d   17
#> 5 e   15

The freq_out() function returns a frequency table as a well-named tbl_df:

freq_out(x)
#> # A tibble: 5 x 2
#>   x         n
#>   <fct> <int>
#> 1 a        25
#> 2 b        26
#> 3 c        17
#> 4 d        17
#> 5 e        15

Human error during data entry often leads to typos and inconsistent spacing and capitlization. This is particularly true when there are multiple individuals working on entering the same categorical data.

production <- factor(c("  HIGH production", "MED production  ",  "MED production  ", " low Production"))
production
#> [1]   HIGH production MED production    MED production     low Production  
#> Levels:   HIGH production  low Production MED production

This can be fixed by identifying individual inconsistencies after factor created, but is time consuming and cumbersome.

The fclean function will go through all of the factor levels and trim extra white space and convert to title case using the stringr package.

fclean(production)
#> [1] High Production Med Production  Med Production  Low Production 
#> Levels: High Production Low Production Med Production