rdataframefunctiondplyrfrequency

Tabulate a column in data.frame ignoring the order of elements in it in R

In my DATA below, I wonder how to table() the variable lang_comb ignoring the order?

For example, "english spanish french" and "french english spanish" are to be considered the same.

Is there a way to tabulate variable lang_comb this way in R?

library(tidyverse)

DATA <- read.table(header=T, text="
ID  lang1    lang2    lang3
1   spanish  english  NA
2   english  spanish  french
3   russian  english  NA
4   french   english  spanish
5   english  russian  NA
6   english  french   NA")


combs <- DATA %>% 
  mutate(lang_comb = paste(lang1, lang2, lang3, sep=","))

with(combs, table(lang_comb))


     english,french,NA     english,russian,NA english,spanish,french french,english,spanish     russian,english,NA 
                     1                      1                      1                      1                      1 
    spanish,english,NA 
                     1
Solution

  • If you sort then collapse your data then order won't matter (because they'll be in the same order):

    library(dplyr)
library(stringr)

DATA |>
  rowwise() |>
  mutate(lang = str_flatten_comma(sort(c_across(starts_with("lang"))))) |>
  ungroup() |>
  count(lang)
#   lang                         n
#   <chr>                    <int>
# 1 english, french              1
# 2 english, french, spanish     2
# 3 english, russian             2
# 4 english, spanish             1

    Or if you want to use table() you can pipe the output of the mutate statement to pull(lang) |> table().