Get Last Value of Vector in R (2 Examples)
In this R tutorial you’ll learn how to access the last value in a vector.
The article is structured as follows:
- Creation of Example Data
- Access Last Value with length Function
- Access Last Value with tail Function
- Video & Further Resources
All right. So first I’m going to create some example data…
Creation of Example Data
Before we can start with the extraction of the last value of a vector, we actually need to create such a vector first:
vec <- c("A", "B", "C", "Z") # Create example vector
Our example vector is a character string and contains the four elements A, B, C, and Z (i.e. Z is the last value of our example vector). Now, let’s extract this last element with some R code…
Access Last Value with length Function
A commonly used R function for accessing the last value of a vector or array is the length function.
The length function returns (as the name of the function indicates) the length of a data object. We can use this information to create a subset of our data containing only the last element of our data:
vec[length(vec)] # Extract last element with length # "Z"
Access Last Value with length Function
An alternative to length() is the tail function. The tail function returns the last x elements of some input data. By specifying the argument n = 1, we can tell the function to return only the very last value in our vector:
tail(vec, 1) # Extract last element with tail # "Z"
Same RStudio console output as before – Looks good!
Video & Further Resources
I have released a video on my YouTube channel, which explains the examples of this tutorial in a live R programming session. In case you want to have a look at the video, you can find it below:
Furthermore, you might want to have a look at some other articles on this website:
- The length Function in R
- Extract First or Last n Characters from String
- Replace Last Comma in Character with &-Sign
- R Functions List (+ Examples)
- The R Programming Language
I hope you learned in this tutorial how to get the last value of a vector in the R programming language. However, if you have any further questions, please let me know in the comments section below.