Thank you Jorge. I did get subset to work on a character vector last night, the only difference being I used two equals signs:
(not working) > Site1 <- subset(Cover, Site = "PtaCaracol") (working) > Site1 <- subset(Cover, Site = = "PtaCaracol") I am unsure why this is, but it worked. I believe this was the error, causing my returned dataframes to contain all the original entries. Thanks again; I will explore the plyr package as well. Ben -----Original Message----- From: Jorge I Velez [mailto:jorgeivanve...@gmail.com] Sent: Fri 4/20/2012 8:17 PM To: Ben Neal Subject: Re: [R] Splitting a dataframe by character vector Dear Ben, Check ?tapply, ?aggregate, ?ave for some ways to accomplish this using the base package. Also, check and check the plyr package at http://plyr.had.co.nz/ along with the examples and accompanying paper. HTH, Jorge.- On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 9:52 PM, Ben Neal <> wrote: > I am just trying to split a dataframe of 750 observations of 29 variables > by "Site", which is a vector in the dataframe with five text names (ex. > PtaCaracol). I just want to generate summary statistics for my other > variables for each site individually. > > I know this should be simple, and I did read up on options, choosing to > use "subset", but I am honestly confounded that this does not result in a > new dataframe split by this factor. I tried "subset" with an argument based > on my various other numeric vectors, and it worked just fine. My very > simple code is below, and thank you for any responses. I apologize for > asking such a simple question, but I wrote this out exactly as found it in > an exactly similar question, which indicated this should work. Now I am > confused! Thank you for any assistance. Ben Neal > > # Load data from CSV file > Cover = read.csv ("/Users/benjaminneal/Documents/1110_Panama/Transect > series /1210_BocasTransectSummary.csv", > header=T) > # Divide dataframe by Site names > Site1 <- subset(Cover, Site = "PtaCaracol") > > PS The csv loads fine, gives normal summary stats, and does not seem to be > the issue. I thought about just renaming by hand all the sites in the file > (i.e. "PtaCaracol"=1 . . but this seems like a weak solution). > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.