length {base} | R Documentation |
Get or set the length of vectors (including lists) and factors, and of any other R object for which a method has been defined.
length(x) length(x) <- value
x |
an R object. For replacement, a vector or factor. |
value |
an integer. |
Both functions are generic: you can write methods to handle specific
classes of objects, see InternalMethods. length<-
has a
"factor"
method.
The replacement form can be used to reset the length of a vector. If
a vector is shortened, extra values are discarded and when a vector is
lengthened, it is padded out to its new length with NA
s
(nul
for raw vectors).
The default method currently returns an integer
of
length 1. Since this may change in the future and may
differ for other methods, programmers should not rely on it.
For vectors (including lists) and factors the length is the number of
elements. For an environment it is the number of objects in the
environment, and NULL
has length 0. For expressions and
pairlists (including language objects and dotlists) it is the length
of the pairlist chain. All other objects (including functions) have
length one: note that for functions this differs from S.
Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.
nchar
for counting the number of characters in
character vectors.
length(diag(4))# = 16 (4 x 4) length(options())# 12 or more length(y ~ x1 + x2 + x3)# 3 length(expression(x, {y <- x^2; y+2}, x^y)) # 3 ## from example(warpbreaks) fm1 <- lm(breaks ~ wool * tension, data = warpbreaks) length(fm1$call) # 3, lm() and two arguments. length(formula(fm1)) # 3, ~ lhs rhs