r - NAs are not allowed in subscripted assignments

Question

I have a simple issue, but I couldn't grasp the logic to overcome it.

I have numeric vectors with NAs and want to apply a condition-dependent operation on them.

A simple example similar to my problem is:

x <- c(1,3,5,7,NA,2,4,6)
x[x>=5] <- c(1:8)[x>=5]
x[x<5] <- (c(1:8)*10)[x<5]

It returns the error "NAs are not allowed in subscripted assignments", so I'd like to know what would be a sensible solution for that, given that running each attribution separately works as expected.

I would like to have the expected result of:

[1]  10  20  3  4 NA  60  70  8

Preferably without having to make a for loop, as this operation is already in a function for null modelling with lots of iterations that is taking ages.

Thank you in advance, Leonardo

NB. NAs mean Not Available values

Answer 1

Your logic will need to also exclude NAs in the subset. See the following example. Note the subsets vectors are stored away before x is modified.

x <- c(1,3,5,7,NA,2,4,6)
subset1 <- x>=5 & !is.na(x)
subset2 <-  x<5 & !is.na(x)

x[subset1] <- which(subset1)
x[subset2] <- 10*which(subset2)