How can I replace all the yes or nos in a vector with another word in R?

Question

I have a vector whose only entries are yes or no. I need to replace each yes with "Institutional" and every no with "Retail".

I have tried for loops, ifelse statements, case_when and replace functions, all to no avail. They all still return the same vector full of yes and no.

Possible duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905038/replace-values-in-a-vector-based-on-another-vector — thelatemail, Aug 20 '20 at 22:26

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 20 '20 at 22:03

I would suggest this:

#Data
vec <- rep(c('yes','no'),10)
vec

[1] "yes" "no"  "yes" "no"  "yes" "no"  "yes" "no"  "yes" "no"  "yes" "no"  "yes" "no"  "yes" "no"  "yes"
[18] "no"  "yes" "no" 

#Replace
vec[vec=='yes'] <- 'Institutional'
vec[vec=='no'] <- 'Retail'
vec

[1] "Institutional" "Retail"        "Institutional" "Retail"        "Institutional" "Retail"       
[7] "Institutional" "Retail"        "Institutional" "Retail"        "Institutional" "Retail"       
[13] "Institutional" "Retail"        "Institutional" "Retail"        "Institutional" "Retail"       
[19] "Institutional" "Retail"

... and similar in motivation, a lookup could be used `c('yes'='Institutional', 'no'='Retail')[vec]` — user20650, Aug 20 '20 at 22:17

ThomasIsCoding · Answer 2 · 2020-08-20T22:15:01.863

1

Maybe you can try ifelse like below

v <- ifelse(v == "yes","Institutional","Retail")

or play some tricks with factor

v <- as.character(factor(v,levels=c("no","yes"), labels = c("Retail","Institutional")))

edited Aug 20 '20 at 22:15

answered Aug 20 '20 at 22:02

ThomasIsCoding

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I think the `factor` idea is sound but it might be nice to be explicit about what level goes with which label - `factor(v, levels=c("No","Yes"), labels=c("Retail","Institutional"))` for instance. – thelatemail Aug 20 '20 at 22:07
@thelatemail Thanks for your advice, I updated my answer – ThomasIsCoding Aug 20 '20 at 22:09
Unfortunately that returns a Named chr "Retail" (because the first entry in the vector is no, I assume) – Frederick Aug 20 '20 at 22:15
@FrederickBernet Neither approach works? Could you show a piece of your data? – ThomasIsCoding Aug 20 '20 at 22:19

How can I replace all the yes or nos in a vector with another word in R?

2 Answers2