splitCH function

Split/collapse capture histories

splitCH will split a character string vector of capture histories into a matrix. The ch can either be single character or comma separated string. The matrix is appended to the original data set (data) if one is specified. Will handle character and numeric values in ch. Results will differ depending on content of ch. collapseCH will collapse a capture history matrix back into a character vector. Argument can either be a capture history matrix (chmat) or a dataframe (data) that contains fields with a specified prefix.

splitCH(x="ch", data=NULL, prefix="Time")
 
        collapseCH(chmat=NULL, data=NULL, prefix="Time", collapse="")

Arguments

• x: A vector containing the character strings of capture histories or the column number or name in the data set data
• data: A data frame containing columnwith value in x if x indicates a column in a data frame
• prefix: first portion of field names for split ch
• chmat: capture history matrix
• collapse: in collapseCH the separator for ch string; defaults to "" but "," also useful if multi-characters are used

Returns

A data frame if data specified and a matrix if vector ch is specified

Examples

data(dipper)
# following returns a matrix
chmat=splitCH(dipper$ch)
# following returns the original dataframe with the ch split into columns
newdipper=splitCH(data=dipper)
# following collapses chmat
ch=collapseCH(chmat)
# following finds fields in newdipper and creates ch
newdipper$ch=NULL
newdipper=collapseCH(data=newdipper)

Author(s)

Devin Johnson; Jeff Laake