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.
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.
devtools::install_github("jennybc/foofactors")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 2The 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 yourOften 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 15The freq_out() function returns a frequency table as a well-named tbl_df:
freq_out(x)
#> # A tibble: 5 × 2
#> x n
#> <fctr> <int>
#> 1 a 25
#> 2 b 26
#> 3 c 17
#> 4 d 17
#> 5 e 15