Unique combination of all elements from two (or mo

问题:

I am trying to create a unique combination of all elements from two vectors of different size in R.

For example, the first vector is

> a <- c("ABC", "DEF", "GHI")

and the second one is dates stored as strings currently

> b <- c("2012-05-01", "2012-05-02", "2012-05-03", "2012-05-04", "2012-05-05")

I need to create a data frame with two columns like this

> data
    a          b
1  ABC 2012-05-01
2  ABC 2012-05-02
3  ABC 2012-05-03
4  ABC 2012-05-04
5  ABC 2012-05-05
6  DEF 2012-05-01
7  DEF 2012-05-02
8  DEF 2012-05-03
9  DEF 2012-05-04
10 DEF 2012-05-05
11 GHI 2012-05-01
12 GHI 2012-05-02
13 GHI 2012-05-03
14 GHI 2012-05-04
15 GHI 2012-05-05

So basically, I am looking for a unique combination by considering all the elements of one vector (a) juxtaposed with all the elements of the second vector (b).

An ideal solution would generalize to more input vectors.

---

See also:
How to generate a matrix of combinations

回答1:

this maybe what you are after

> expand.grid(a,b)
   Var1       Var2
1   ABC 2012-05-01
2   DEF 2012-05-01
3   GHI 2012-05-01
4   ABC 2012-05-02
5   DEF 2012-05-02
6   GHI 2012-05-02
7   ABC 2012-05-03
8   DEF 2012-05-03
9   GHI 2012-05-03
10  ABC 2012-05-04
11  DEF 2012-05-04
12  GHI 2012-05-04
13  ABC 2012-05-05
14  DEF 2012-05-05
15  GHI 2012-05-05

If the resulting order isn't what you want, you can sort afterwards. If you name the arguments to expand.grid, they will become column names:

df = expand.grid(a = a, b = b)
df[order(df$a), ]

And expand.grid generalizes to any number of input columns.

回答2:

The tidyr package provides the nice alternative crossing, which works better than the classic expand.grid function because (1) strings are not converted into factors and (2) the sorting is more intuitive:

library(tidyr)

a <- c("ABC", "DEF", "GHI")
b <- c("2012-05-01", "2012-05-02", "2012-05-03", "2012-05-04", "2012-05-05")

crossing(a, b)

# A tibble: 15 x 2
       a          b
   <chr>      <chr>
 1   ABC 2012-05-01
 2   ABC 2012-05-02
 3   ABC 2012-05-03
 4   ABC 2012-05-04
 5   ABC 2012-05-05
 6   DEF 2012-05-01
 7   DEF 2012-05-02
 8   DEF 2012-05-03
 9   DEF 2012-05-04
10   DEF 2012-05-05
11   GHI 2012-05-01
12   GHI 2012-05-02
13   GHI 2012-05-03
14   GHI 2012-05-04
15   GHI 2012-05-05

回答3:

you can use order function for sorting any number of columns. for your example

df <- expand.grid(a,b)
> df
   Var1       Var2
1   ABC 2012-05-01
2   DEF 2012-05-01
3   GHI 2012-05-01
4   ABC 2012-05-02
5   DEF 2012-05-02
6   GHI 2012-05-02
7   ABC 2012-05-03
8   DEF 2012-05-03
9   GHI 2012-05-03
10  ABC 2012-05-04
11  DEF 2012-05-04
12  GHI 2012-05-04
13  ABC 2012-05-05
14  DEF 2012-05-05
15  GHI 2012-05-05

> df[order( df[,1], df[,2] ),] 
   Var1       Var2
1   ABC 2012-05-01
4   ABC 2012-05-02
7   ABC 2012-05-03
10  ABC 2012-05-04
13  ABC 2012-05-05
2   DEF 2012-05-01
5   DEF 2012-05-02
8   DEF 2012-05-03
11  DEF 2012-05-04
14  DEF 2012-05-05
3   GHI 2012-05-01
6   GHI 2012-05-02
9   GHI 2012-05-03
12  GHI 2012-05-04
15  GHI 2012-05-05`