Remove NA values from a vector

Solution 1:

Trying ?max, you'll see that it actually has a na.rm = argument, set by default to FALSE. (That's the common default for many other R functions, including sum(), mean(), etc.)

Setting na.rm=TRUE does just what you're asking for:

d <- c(1, 100, NA, 10)
max(d, na.rm=TRUE)

If you do want to remove all of the NAs, use this idiom instead:

d <- d[!is.na(d)]

A final note: Other functions (e.g. table(), lm(), and sort()) have NA-related arguments that use different names (and offer different options). So if NA's cause you problems in a function call, it's worth checking for a built-in solution among the function's arguments. I've found there's usually one already there.

Solution 2:

The na.omit function is what a lot of the regression routines use internally:

vec <- 1:1000
vec[runif(200, 1, 1000)] <- NA
max(vec)
#[1] NA
max( na.omit(vec) )
#[1] 1000

Solution 3:

Use discard from purrr (works with lists and vectors).

discard(v, is.na) 

The benefit is that it is easy to use pipes; alternatively use the built-in subsetting function [:

v %>% discard(is.na)
v %>% `[`(!is.na(.))

Note that na.omit does not work on lists:

> x <- list(a=1, b=2, c=NA)
> na.omit(x)
$a
[1] 1

$b
[1] 2

$c
[1] NA