Get All Factor Levels of Vector & Data Frame Column in R (2 Examples)
In this article you’ll learn how to return all levels of a factor object in the R programming language.
Table of contents:
It’s time to dive into the examples!
Example 1: List All Factor Levels of Vector
The following code shows how to print all levels of a factor vector to the RStudio console.
First, we have to create an exemplifying vector in R:
vec <- factor(c("A", "x", "bb", "A", "bb", "Hey")) # Create example vector vec # Print example vector # [1] A x bb A bb Hey # Levels: A bb Hey x
Our example vector contains six vector elements and several different factor levels.
We can now apply the levels function to return all unique factor levels of our vector:
levels(vec) # Return all factor levels of vector # [1] "A" "bb" "Hey" "x"
The previous output of the RStudio console shows the four different levels of our example vector.
Example 2: List All Factor Levels of Data Frame Columns
In this example, I’ll explain how to determine the factor levels contained in a data frame.
First, we have to create a data frame in R:
data <- data.frame(x1 = factor(letters[1:5]), # Create example data x2 = factor(c("x", "y", "x", "x", "y")), x3 = factor(c("aaa", "lili", "aaa", "lolo", "aa"))) data # Print example data
In Table 1 you can see that we have managed to create a data frame with three factor variables.
We can now apply the levels function to only one column to get the factor levels of this specific column:
levels(data$x1) # Return all factor levels of column # [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e"
If we want to know the factor levels of each column of our data frame, we can apply the levels function in combination with the sapply function:
sapply(data, levels) # Return all factor levels of each column # $x1 # [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" # # $x2 # [1] "x" "y" # # $x3 # [1] "aa" "aaa" "lili" "lolo" #
As you can see, we have created a list where each list element contains the factor levels of one of our data frame columns.
Video & Further Resources
Do you need more explanations on the R programming syntax of this article? Then you may want to have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. In the video, I explain the contents of the present tutorial:
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Furthermore, you might have a look at the other tutorials of my homepage. I have released numerous articles on topics such as ggplot2, factors, and graphics in R.
- Keep Unused Factor Levels in ggplot2 Barplot
- droplevels R Example
- Reorder Levels of Factor without Changing Order of Values
- R Programming Examples
To summarize: In this article, I have illustrated how to return all factor levels of a vector or data frame in the R programming language. Don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments section, in case you have any further questions.
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