r - How to count how many values per level in a given factor?

Question

I have a data.frame mydf with about 2500 rows. These rows correspond to 69 classes of objects in colum 1 mydf$V1, and I want to count how many rows per object class I have. I can get a factor of these classes with:

objectclasses = unique(factor(mydf$V1, exclude="1"));

What's the terse R way to count the rows per object class? If this were any other language I'd be traversing an array with a loop and keeping count but I'm new to R programming and am trying to take advantage of R's vectorised operations.

Answer 1

Or using the dplyr library:

library(dplyr)
set.seed(1)
dat <- data.frame(ID = sample(letters,100,rep=TRUE))
dat %>% 
  group_by(ID) %>%
  summarise(no_rows = length(ID))

Note the use of %>%, which is similar to the use of pipes in bash. Effectively, the code above pipes dat into group_by, and the result of that operation is piped into summarise.

The result is:

Source: local data frame [26 x 2]

   ID no_rows
1   a       2
2   b       3
3   c       3
4   d       3
5   e       2
6   f       4
7   g       6
8   h       1
9   i       6
10  j       5
11  k       6
12  l       4
13  m       7
14  n       2
15  o       2
16  p       2
17  q       5
18  r       4
19  s       5
20  t       3
21  u       8
22  v       4
23  w       5
24  x       4
25  y       3
26  z       1

See the dplyr introduction for some more context, and the documentation for details regarding the individual functions.