autoFill function

Automatically fill out blanks of a vector with the preceding label

autoFill is commonly used to generate labels from columns of a spreadsheet when many cells are left blank in order to save a lot of typing. For instance, c("a","","","b","") becomes c("a","a","a","b","b")

autoFill(x, squash = FALSE)

Arguments

• x: a vector of character strings
• squash: If set to TRUE then leading and trailing spaces are removed which is useful if spaces are inadvertantly typed because these may be hard to track down. Default: FALSE

Returns

• x: a vector of character strings with blank strings replaced by preceding non--blank strings

Author(s)

Peter Baker p.baker1@uq.edu.au

Note

While this function may be called directly, it is more often called by makeLabel

See Also

makeLabel uses autoFill to create labels from two columns of marker names

Examples

## description: fill out blanks of a vector with preceeding label
  label.1 <- c("a","","","b","")
  print(autoFill(label.1))

  label.2 <- c("agc","","","","gct5","","ccc","","")
  print(autoFill(label.2))