Nested ifelse Statement in R (2 Examples)
In this article you’ll learn how to apply nested ifelse statements in the R programming language.
Table of contents:
Here’s how to do it.
Example 1: Nested ifelse Statement with Multiple TRUE Conditions
This section illustrates how to nest two ifelse statements in R. Have a look at the following R code:
ifelse(test = 5 > 3, # First test condition yes = ifelse(test = 5 > 4, # Second test condition yes = "TRUE Twice", no = "Yes & No"), no = "No") # "TRUE Twice"
The previous R syntax nests two ifelse statements. The second ifelse statement is applied in case the first logical test condition is TRUE.
In this example, the first and the second test conditions are TRUE. For that reason, the nested ifelse statement returns the output “TRUE Twice”.
Example 2: Nested ifelse Statement with TRUE & FALSE Conditions
Example 2 shows how to create a nested ifelse statement where the first condition is TRUE and the second condition is FALSE:
ifelse(test = 5 > 3, # First test condition yes = ifelse(test = 5 <= 4, # Second test condition yes = "TRUE Twice", no = "Yes & No"), no = "No") # "Yes & No"
The output is “Yes & No”.
Video & Further Resources
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At this point you should have learned how to nest two ifelse functions in the R programming language. In case you have additional questions, please let me know in the comments section.
I’m Joachim Schork. On this website, I provide statistics tutorials as well as code in Python and R programming.
2 Comments. Leave new
Better use dplyr::case_when() (https://dplyr.tidyverse.org/reference/case_when.html) than writing nested ifelse statments. It’s easier to read and debug.
Hello Frederik,
Each user has their own preference in coding. Therefore we provide as much as options as we can. We also have a tutorial about case_when. You can take a look. By the way, you are right about the advantages of case_when(). However, we can argue that the user can still prefer ifelse() since it has a simple structure based on basic conditional logic and it does not require any additional package to be installed, contrary to case_when().
Thank you for your input. I am sure that our readers benefit from it.
Regards,
Cansu