fillBlanks function

Fill blank entries in a vector

fillBlanks(x, blankGrep = c("[ \t]*"), first = "", ...)

Arguments

• x: character vector
• blankGrep: vector of grep patterns, or NA, indicating the type of entry to be considered blank. Each blankGrep pattern is searched using jamba::proigrep(), which by default uses case-insensitive regular expression pattern matching.
• first: options character string intended when the first entry of x is blank. By default "" is used.
• ...: additional parameters are ignored.

Returns

character vector where blank entries are filled with the most recent non-blank value.

Details

This function takes a character vector and fills any blank (missing) entries with the last non-blank entry in the vector. It is intended for situations like imported 'Excel' data, where there may be one header value representing a series of cells.

The method used does not loop through the data, and should scale fairly well with good efficiency even for extremely large vectors.

Examples

x <- c("A", "", "", "", "B", "C", "", "", NA,
   "D", "", "", "E", "F", "G", "", "");
data.frame(x, fillBlanks(x));

See Also

Other jam string functions: asSize(), breaksByVector(), formatInt(), gsubOrdered(), gsubs(), makeNames(), nameVector(), nameVectorN(), padInteger(), padString(), pasteByRow(), pasteByRowOrdered(), sizeAsNum(), tcount(), ucfirst()