In R, I have an element x and a vector v. I want to find the first index of an element in v that is equal to x. I know that one way to do this is: which(x == v)[[1]], but that seems excessively inefficient. Is there a more direct way to do it?
For bonus points, is there a function that works if x is a vector? That is, it should return a vector of indices indicating the position of each element of x in v.
The function match works on vectors:
x <- sample(1:10)
x
# [1] 4 5 9 3 8 1 6 10 7 2
match(c(4,8),x)
# [1] 1 5
match only returns the first encounter of a match, as you requested. It returns the position in the second argument of the values in the first argument.
For multiple matching, %in% is the way to go:
x <- sample(1:4,10,replace=TRUE)
x
# [1] 3 4 3 3 2 3 1 1 2 2
which(x %in% c(2,4))
# [1] 2 5 9 10
%in% returns a logical vector as long as the first argument, with a TRUE if that value can be found in the second argument and a FALSE otherwise.