Beyond Spreadsheets with R

5 Combining data values

This chapter covers

• Creating structures containing grouped data: vectors, lists, data, frames, and more
• How these interact with missing data
• Inspecting and querying these new structures

So far we’ve only dealt with single-valued variables, but it’s highly unlikely that your data looks so simple. You need a way to combine values into groups of data that together represent some larger concept. There are many ways to do this in R, and the way you store collections of data can impact how you interact with it later, so let’s see some of the different ways to combine data.

5.1 Simple collections

The simplest way to group together values is with the function c(). Feel free to refer to this function however you like, but ...