How to Catch an integer(0) in R (2 Examples)
In this R post you’ll learn how to identify an integer of length zero.
The page contains the following topics:
So let’s just jump right in!
Example Data
Consider the exemplifying data below.
x <- which("a" == "b") # Create integer with length zero x # Print example integer # integer(0)
As you can see based on the previous output of the RStudio console, our example data object is an integer with a length of zero.
Example 1: Test for Length of Data Object Using length() Function
This example shows how to check for the length of a data object to identify whether an integer has a length of zero.
For this, we simply need to apply the length function to our data object:
length(x) # Apply length function # [1] 0
The RStudio console returns the value 0, i.e. our data object is an integer(0) object.
Example 2: Create User-Defined Function to Test for Length of Data Object
In this example, I’ll explain how to create a user defined function that returns information on the length of a data object.
First, we have to create our function:
fun_int0 <- function(my_data) { # Create user-defined function if(length(my_data) == 0 & is.integer(my_data)) { print("The data object is integer(0).") # [1] "The data object is integer(0)." } else { print("The data object is NOT integer(0).") # [1] "The data object is NOT integer(0)." } }
Now, we can apply our manually defined function to our example data:
fun_int0(x) # Apply user-defined function to integer(0) # [1] "The data object is integer(0)."
The RStudio console shows that our data is an integer(0) object.
Let’s apply our function to a normal integer vector with longer length:
fun_int0(1:5) # Apply user-defined function to longer object # [1] "The data object is NOT integer(0)."
The RStudio console shows that the vector 1:5 is not an integer(0) data object.
Video, Further Resources & Summary
Would you like to know more about integers and other data types? Then you may watch the following video of my YouTube channel. I explain the R programming codes of this article in the video tutorial:
In addition, you could read the other tutorials on this homepage.
To summarize: In this R tutorial you have learned how to catch an empty integer.
Please note that a similar syntax as shown in the present tutorial could be used to test for other vectors of length 0 such as character(0), numeric(0), or factor(0).
If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments.