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rvectorizationdigits

Compute digit-sums in specific columns of a data frame

I'm trying to sum the digits of integers in the last 2 columns of my data frame. I have found a function that does the summing, but I think I may have an issue with applying the function - not sure?

Dataframe
a = c("a", "b", "c")
b = c(1, 11, 2)
c = c(2, 4, 23)
data <- data.frame(a,b,c)

#Digitsum function
digitsum <- function(x) sum(floor(x / 10^(0:(nchar(as.character(x)) - 1))) %% 10)

#Applying function
data[2:3] <- lapply(data[2:3], digitsum)

This is the error that I get:

*Warning messages:
1: In 0:(nchar(as.character(x)) - 1) :
  numerical expression has 3 elements: only the first used
2: In 0:(nchar(as.character(x)) - 1) :
  numerical expression has 3 elements: only the first used*
Solution

  • Your function digitsum at the moment works fine for a single scalar input, for example,

    digitsum(32)
# [1] 5

    But, it can not take a vector input, otherwise ":" will complain. You need to vectorize this function, using Vectorize:

    vec_digitsum <- Vectorize(digitsum)

    Then it works for a vector input:

    b = c(1, 11, 2)
vec_digitsum(b)
# [1] 1 2 2

    Now you can use lapply without trouble.