data types

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Author(s) Examples

replace the values in a table, at specific positions, referenced by the row name/index, the column name/index.

1	replace.cells(tab, row, col, val)

`tab`	a matrix or data.frame of values, to be edited
`row`	a vector of row names or indices
`col`	a vector of col names or indices
`val`	a vector of values to insert into tab at the locations specified by row and col

Common usage scenario
Given a spreadsheet of patients with mutated genes, you want to indicate in a square matrix of genes x patients, which ones have a mutation. Thus a priori, you know which elements you want to edit, but it's very fiddly using the "[", "]" nomenclature to indicate which cells within the matrix to edit.

a matrix or data.frame like tab, with those values specified by the row, col tuples changed to the values specified by val.

Mark Cowley, 2011-09-20

mat <- matrix(0, 5, 5)
replace.cells(mat, 1:5, 1:5, rep(NA, 5))
df <- as.data.frame(mat)
dimnames(df) <- list(letters[1:5], LETTERS[1:5])
replace.cells(df, c("a", "a", "e"), c("D", "B", "A"), 1:3)