I'm trying to collapse a long list of levels for a factor variable, and for neatness's sake would rather create a named list outside of my munging pipe, but I can't seem to get this to work with fct_collapse even though there's nothing in the code that would suggest that it shouldn't.
library(tidyverse)
library(forcats)
data(gss_cat)
party_change <- lst(
missing = c("No answer", "Don't know"),
other = "Other party",
rep = c("Strong republican", "Not str republican"),
ind = c("Ind,near rep", "Independent", "Ind,near dem"),
dem = c("Not str democrat", "Strong democrat")
)
partyid2 <- fct_collapse(gss_cat$partyid, party_change)
fct_count(partyid2)
# A tibble: 1 x 2
f n
<fct> <int>
1 "" 21483
Any suggestions for how I might be able to get this to work? TIA!
Definitely up-to-date with forcats--even tried the dev version--but your reprex doesn't recreate my problem: I'm trying to separately declare a named list of factors/replacements and use that as an argument in fct_collapse instead of calling each replacement explicitly.
Also tried using list instead of lst as per @floresf but am getting the same result (namely, all levels get replaced with an empty string, "".
Whoops, just realised you're trying to go in the opposite direction with this!
Summary
Oh, oh! Sorry, I misunderstood. I'm still not 100% clear on what you're aiming for here (sorry, it's been a long day). But, you can use fct_c() with !!! to splice a list of factors you want to combine.
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(tidyverse))
library(forcats)
party_change <- list(
missing = factor(c("No answer", "Don't know")),
other = factor("Other party"),
rep = factor(c("Strong republican", "Not str republican")),
ind = factor(c("Ind,near rep", "Independent", "Ind,near dem")),
dem = factor(c("Not str democrat", "Strong democrat"))
)
fct_c(!!!party_change)
#> [1] No answer Don't know Other party
#> [4] Strong republican Not str republican Ind,near rep
#> [7] Independent Ind,near dem Not str democrat
#> [10] Strong democrat
#> 10 Levels: Don't know No answer Other party ... Strong democrat
Thanks for keeping at it with this!! I imagine the 1:1 list might work with fct_recode as well (though I haven't tried it)--I was trying to avoid doing a 1:1 since I had about 100 factors I was recoding into about 17 factors, and at that point might as well just make a find/replace table...at any rate, I ended up just doing the named arguments in the body of the fct_collapse function. Not pretty but it works
I was wrong on my previous answer. I guess it's a long day for me after all Sorry about that!
Just for reference, fct_collapse() is expecting a series of named character vectors, as you can see by the ... parameter of the function. So a named list is not appropriate and some manual conversion is needed, at least in the current version of forcats.
Sorry about that!