R Language Creating vectors Expanding a vector with the rep() function
Example
The rep function can be used to repeat a vector in a fairly flexible manner.
# repeat counting numbers, 1 through 5 twice
rep(1:5, 2)
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
# repeat vector with incomplete recycling
rep(1:5, 2, length.out=7)
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 1 2
The each argument is especially useful for expanding a vector of statistics of observational/experimental units into a vector of data.frame with repeated observations of these units.
# same except repeat each integer next to each other
rep(1:5, each=2)
[1] 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5
A nice feature of rep regarding involving expansion to such a data structure is that expansion of a vector to an unbalanced panel can be accomplished by replacing the length argument with a vector that dictates the number of times to repeat each element in the vector:
# automated length repetition
rep(1:5, 1:5)
[1] 1 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5
# hand-fed repetition length vector
rep(1:5, c(1,1,1,2,2))
[1] 1 2 3 4 4 5 5
This should expose the possibility of allowing an external function to feed the second argument of rep in order to dynamically construct a vector that expands according to the data.
As with seq, faster, simplified versions of rep are rep_len and rep.int. These drop some attributes that rep maintains and so may be most useful in situations where speed is a concern and additional aspects of the repeated vector are unnecessary.
# repeat counting numbers, 1 through 5 twice
rep.int(1:5, 2)
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
# repeat vector with incomplete recycling
rep_len(1:5, length.out=7)
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 1 2
