I am trying to do something very simple, which is use the forcats package in R to work with factors. I have a dataframe with some factor variables, one of which is gender, and I'm simply trying to count the occurrence of the variables using fct_count. The syntax is shown in the documentation as fct_count(f) (what could be easier!).
I'm trying to do this the dplyr way, using the pipe operator instead of the $ syntax to access the variables, but it doesn't seem to work. Am I just fundamentally misunderstanding the syntax?
pid <- c('id1','id2','id3','id4','id5','id6')
gender <- c('Male','Female','Other','Male','Female','Female')
df <- data.frame(pid, gender)
df <- as.tibble(df)
df
# A tibble: 6 x 2
pid gender
<chr> <fct>
1 id1 Male
2 id2 Female
3 id3 Other
4 id4 Male
5 id5 Female
6 id6 Female
# This throws an error
df %>%
mutate(gender = as.factor(gender)) %>%
fct_count(gender) # Error: `f` must be a factor (or character vector).
# This works but doesn't use the nice dplyr select syntax
fct_count(df$gender)
# A tibble: 3 x 2
f n
<fct> <int>
1 Female 3
2 Male 2
3 Other 1
Where am I going wrong? New to dplyr and sorry for such a daft question but I can't seem to find a basic example anywhere!
fct_count takes a vector that is of type factor or char, it isn't especially aware of tibbles and dataframes. So the simplest pipe would be...
library(dplyr)
library(forcats)
df %>%
pull(gender) %>%
fct_count
#> # A tibble: 3 x 2
#> f n
#> <fct> <int>
#> 1 Female 3
#> 2 Male 2
#> 3 Other 1
Your data
pid <- c('id1','id2','id3','id4','id5','id6')
gender <- c('Male','Female','Other','Male','Female','Female')
df <- data.frame(pid, gender)
df <- tibble::as_tibble(df)
df