Fill blank entries in a vector

Fill blank entries in a vector

Usage

fillBlanks(x, blankGrep = c("[ \t]*"), first = "", ...)

Arguments

x

character vector

blankGrep

vector of grep patterns, or NA, indicating the type of entry to be considered blank. Each blankGrep pattern is searched using jamba::proigrep(), which by default uses case-insensitive regular expression pattern matching.

first

options character string intended when the first entry of x is blank. By default "" is used.

...

additional parameters are ignored.

Value

character vector where blank entries are filled with the most recent non-blank value.

Details

This function takes a character vector and fills any blank (missing) entries with the last non-blank entry in the vector. It is intended for situations like imported 'Excel' data, where there may be one header value representing a series of cells.

The method used does not loop through the data, and should scale fairly well with good efficiency even for extremely large vectors.

See also

Other jam string functions: asSize(), breaksByVector(), formatInt(), gsubOrdered(), gsubs(), makeNames(), nameVector(), nameVectorN(), padInteger(), padString(), pasteByRow(), pasteByRowOrdered(), sizeAsNum(), tcount(), ucfirst()

Examples

x <- c("A", "", "", "", "B", "C", "", "", NA,
   "D", "", "", "E", "F", "G", "", "");
data.frame(x, fillBlanks(x));
#>       x fillBlanks.x.
#> 1     A             A
#> 2                   A
#> 3                   A
#> 4                   A
#> 5     B             B
#> 6     C             C
#> 7                   C
#> 8                   C
#> 9  <NA>          <NA>
#> 10    D             D
#> 11                  D
#> 12                  D
#> 13    E             E
#> 14    F             F
#> 15    G             G
#> 16                  G
#> 17                  G