R: Data Analysis and Visualization

Vectors

Vectors are the most basic data structures in R, and they are ubiquitous indeed. In fact, even the single values that we've been working with thus far were actually vectors of length 1. That's why the interactive R console has been printing [1] along with all of our output.

Vectors are essentially an ordered collection of values of the same atomic data type. Vectors can be arbitrarily large (with some limitations), or they can be just one single value.

The canonical way of building vectors manually is by using the c() function (which stands for combine).

  > our.vect <- c(8, 6, 7, 5, 3, 0, 9)
  > our.vect
  [1] 8 6 7 5 3 0 9

In the preceding example, we created a numeric vector of length 7 (namely, Jenny's telephone number).

Note that if we tried ...