Question

I have a very basic R question but I am having a hard time trying to get the right answer. I have a data frame that looks like this:

species <- "ABC"
ind <- rep(1:4, each = 24)
hour <- rep(seq(0, 23, by = 1), 4)
depth <- runif(length(ind), 1, 50)
    
df <- data.frame(cbind(species, ind, hour, depth))
df$depth <- as.numeric(df$depth)

What I would like it to select AND replace all the rows where depth < 10 (for example) with zero, but I want to keep all the information associated to those rows and the original dimensions of the data frame.

I have try the following but this does not work.

df[df$depth<10] <- 0 

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

# reassign depth values under 10 to zero
df$depth[df$depth<10] <- 0

(For the columns that are factors, you can only assign values that are factor levels. If you wanted to assign a value that wasn’t currently a factor level, you would need to create the additional level first:

levels(df$species) <- c(levels(df$species), "unknown") 
df$species[df$depth<10]  <- "unknown"