R if statement for characters exist in range

Asked Sep 22 '16 at 20:15

Active Sep 22 '16 at 20:15

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I'm trying to create a new column if character strings exist for both columns A & B of a dataframe. I thought the following would work, but its not finding characters in every cell:

df = structure(list(Participant = 1:3, A = c("char", "foo", ""), B = c("char2","", "")), .Names = c("Participant", "A", "B"), row.names = c(NA,-3L), class = "data.frame")

df$newcolumn <- ifelse(nchar(data$A)>0 && nchar(data$B)>0, "character", "nocharacter")

I'm unexpectedly getting 'nocharacter' for all rows. Anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? Thanks!

asked Sep 22 '16 at 20:15

lmcshane

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replace `&&` by `&` – HubertL Sep 22 '16 at 20:17
to add to what HubertL said, && is only comparing the first element of each vector, see `?base::Logic` – C8H10N4O2 Sep 22 '16 at 20:21
This might be a better dupe: [R gotcha: logical-and operator for combining conditions is & not &&](http://stackoverflow.com/q/6933598/903061) – Gregor Thomas Sep 22 '16 at 20:31
@Gregor Replacing '&&' with '&' does not solve the problem. I get a logical(0) as a response. – lmcshane Sep 22 '16 at 21:43
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The other problem in your question code is that you use both `df` and `data` as the name of your data frame. If you change `data$` to `df$` it works fine for me. – Gregor Thomas Sep 22 '16 at 22:15

R if statement for characters exist in range

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