carrec: Recode a Variable

In stevemisc: Steve's Miscellaneous Functions

Recode a Variable

Description

This recodes a numeric vector, character vector, or factor according to fairly simple recode specifications that former Stata users will appreciate. Yes, this is taken from John Fox's recode() unction in his car package. I'm going with carrec() (i.e. shorthand for car::recode(), phonetically here: "car-wreck") for this package, with an additional shorthand of carr that does the same thing.

The goal here is to minimize the number of function clashes with multiple packages that I use in my workflow. For example: car, dplyr, and Hmisc all have recode() functions. I rely on the car package just for this function, but it conflicts with some other tidyverse functions that are vital to my workflow.

Usage

carrec(var, recodes, as_fac, as_num = TRUE, levels)

carr(...)

Arguments

var	numeric vector, character vector, or factor
recodes	character string of recode specifications: see below, but former Stata users will find this stuff familiar
as_fac	return a factor; default is TRUE if var is a factor, FALSE otherwise
as_num	if TRUE (which is the default) and as.factor is FALSE, the result will be coerced to a numeric if all values in the result are numeric. This should be what you want in 99% of applications for regression analysis.
levels	an optional argument specifying the order of the levels in the returned factor; the default is to use the sort order of the level names.
...	optional, only to make the shortcut (carr()) work

Details

Recode specifications appear in a character string, separated by semicolons (see the examples below), of the form input=output. If an input value satisfies more than one specification, then the first (from left to right) applies. If no specification is satisfied, then the input value is carried over to the result. NA is allowed on input and output.

Value

carrec() returns a vector, recoded to the specifications of the user. carr() is a simple shortcut forcarrec().

Author(s)

John Fox

References

Fox, J. and Weisberg, S. (2019). An R Companion to Applied Regression, Third Edition, Sage.

Examples

x <- seq(1,10)
carrec(x,"0=0;1:2=1;3:5=2;6:10=3")

stevemisc documentation built on Nov. 6, 2023, 9:06 a.m.