Counting the number of elements with the values of x in a vector

Question

I have a vector of numbers:

numbers <- c(4,23,4,23,5,43,54,56,657,67,67,435,
         453,435,324,34,456,56,567,65,34,435)

How can I hav

Answer 1

This is a very fast solution for one-dimensional atomic vectors. It relies on match(), so it is compatible with NA:

x <- c("a", NA, "a", "c", "a", "b", NA, "c")

fn <- function(x) {
  u <- unique.default(x)
  out <- list(x = u, freq = .Internal(tabulate(match(x, u), length(u))))
  class(out) <- "data.frame"
  attr(out, "row.names") <- seq_along(u)
  out
}

fn(x)

#>      x freq
#> 1    a    3
#> 2     2
#> 3    c    2
#> 4    b    1

You could also tweak the algorithm so that it doesn't run unique().

fn2 <- function(x) {
  y <- match(x, x)
  out <- list(x = x, freq = .Internal(tabulate(y, length(x)))[y])
  class(out) <- "data.frame"
  attr(out, "row.names") <- seq_along(x)
  out
}

fn2(x)

#>      x freq
#> 1    a    3
#> 2     2
#> 3    a    3
#> 4    c    2
#> 5    a    3
#> 6    b    1
#> 7     2
#> 8    c    2

In cases where that output is desirable, you probably don't even need it to re-return the original vector, and the second column is probably all you need. You can get that in one line with the pipe:

match(x, x) %>% `[`(tabulate(.), .)

#> [1] 3 2 3 2 3 1 2 2