How to Access the Last Value in a R Vector?

How to access the last value in an R vector? You can use the length() function to access the last value in a vector. Vectors are a common data structure in R programming language that can store values of common data types. In this article, I will explain various methods of R to access the last value in a vector with multiple examples.

Key points-

• The length() function returns the number of elements in a vector, allowing you to index the last value directly.
• The tail() function is a convenient way to obtain the last value of a vector by specifying the number of elements to return.
• Indexing with length is another straightforward method to access the last element.
• By reversing the vector with the rev() function and accessing the first element, you can retrieve the last value.
• The dplyr package provides the last() function, which simplifies extracting the last element from a vector.
• The subset() function can be used with length to filter and obtain the last value.
• The which.max() function, applied to the vector sequence, allows identification of the last element.

Using the length() function

Let’s create a character vector using the c() function in R, which combines values into a vector. Next, use the length() function to get the length of the vector, which corresponds to the position of its last element. Finally, use this position to access the last value in the vector.

# Get last value of vector using length()
vec <- c("Spark", "By", "Examples")
print("Given vector")
print(vec)
last_value <- vec[length(vec)]
print("Get last value from the vector:")
print(last_value)

Yields below output.

Using tail() function

In R, the tail() function is used to retrieve the last value of a vector. To do this, set the n parameter to 1 and pass it into this function along with the vector. This will return the last value of the specified vector.

# Get last value of vector using tail()
vec <- c("Spark", "By", "Examples")
print("Given vector")
print(vec)
last_value <- tail(vec, n=1)
print("Get the last value from the vector:")
print(last_value)

Yields the same as the above output.

Using reverse indexing

Alternatively, you can use the rev() function to get the last value present in the vector. This function reverses the order of the values in the vector. After reversing the vector, you can use square bracket notation [1] to access the first element of this reversed vector.

# Get last value of vector using rev()
vec <- c("Spark", "By", "Examples")
print("Given vector")
print(vec)
last_value <- rev(vec)[1]
print("Get the last value from the vector:")
print(last_value)

This syntax rev(vec)[1] retrieves the first element of the reversed vector, which is Examples.

Yields the same as the above output.

Using dplyr package

You can utilize the last() function from the dplyr package to easily access the last value of a vector. When using functions from the dplyr package, installing the package in your R environment is important. Once installed, load the package using library(dplyr).

The last() function specifically returns the last value of a vector. To retrieve this value, you simply pass the vector as an argument to the last() function.

# Get last value of vector using dplyr
library(dplyr)
vec <- c("Spark", "By", "Examples")
print("Given vector")
print(vec)
last_value <- last(vec)
print("Get the last value from the vector:")
print(last_value)

Yields the same as the above output.

Using subset() with length

In this example, you can use the subset() function along with length() to access the last value of a vector. Initially, you pass the seq_along(vec) function,(which generates a sequence of indices corresponding to the length of the vector) to the subset() function along with the vector itself. This approach retrieves a subset of the vector that includes the last value, effectively returning the last element of the vector.

# Get last value of vector using subset()
vec <- c("Spark", "By", "Examples")
print("Given vector")
print(vec)
last_value <- subset(vec, seq_along(vec) == length(vec))
print("Get the last value from the vector:")
print(last_value)

Yields the same as the above output.

Using which.max() Function

Finally, you can use the which.max() function along with the seq_along( ) function to access the last value present in the vector. First, you can use the seq_along() function to generate a sequence of indices corresponding to the length of the vector and then apply which.max() to identify the maximum value within that sequence. This maximum value corresponds to the index of the last element in the vector, which you can then access directly to obtain the last value.

# Get last value of vector using which.max()
vec <- c("Spark", "By", "Examples")
print("Given vector")
print(vec)
last_value <- vec[which.max(seq_along(vec))]
print("Get the last value from the vector:")
print(last_value)

Yields the same as the above output.

Conclusion

In this article, I have explained various approaches of R to access the last value in a vector, such as base R functions and additional packages like dplyr with well-defined examples.