Can `replace_na` replace NaN values with NA_real_ ?

[kaseyzapatka]

Hi all,

I have some observations in a dataframe that are NaNs that I want to replace with NA_real_ to run additional calculations. I've found using mutate(var = replace_na(var, NA_real_)) works, but I can't find any documentation for replace_na() saying this should since it is supposed to only replace NA/NA_real_ with another value you specify.

Can someone verify the code under the hood of replace_na() also replaces NaN as well? Or is this just some anomaly that it's working for me.

Best,
Kasey

[nirgrahamuk]

you can test this for yourself. NaN's are considered NA

> is.na(NaN)
[1] TRUE

Here are some of the functions you requested. In general you can search for them with getAnywhere (and a combination of methods, as replace_na is a method for data.frame)

> getAnywhere(replace_na.data.frame)
A single object matching ‘replace_na.data.frame’ was found
It was found in the following places
  registered S3 method for replace_na from namespace tidyr
  namespace:tidyr
with value

function (data, replace = list(), ...) 
{
    stopifnot(is_list(replace))
    replace_vars <- intersect(names(replace), names(data))
    for (var in replace_vars) {
        check_replacement(replace[[var]], var)
        data[[var]][!is_complete(data[[var]])] <- replace[[var]]
    }
    data
}
<bytecode: 0x0000028478f60e18>
<environment: namespace:tidyr>

> getAnywhere(is_complete)[2]
function (x) 
{
    if (typeof(x) == "list") {
        !vapply(x, is_empty, logical(1))
    }
    else {
        !is.na(x)
    }
}
<bytecode: 0x0000028478ee8b48>
<environment: namespace:tidyr>

[kaseyzapatka]

Thanks @nirgrahamuk! Yea, my code worked, so I figured, but I know NaN and NA are not exactly the same. But the is.na function gives me confidence here