Generate unique row ids within each group

Convenience functions for generating a unique row ids within each group. It accepts atomic vectors, lists, data.frames or data.tables as input.

rowid is intended for interactive use, particularly along with the function dcast to generate unique ids directly in the formula.

rowidv(DT, cols=c("x", "y")) is equivalent to column N in the code DT[, N := seq_len(.N), by=c("x", "y")].

See examples for more.

rowid(..., prefix=NULL)
rowidv(x, cols=seq_along(x), prefix=NULL)

Arguments

x

A vector, list, data.frame or data.table.
...

A sequence of numeric, integer64, character or logical vectors, all of same length. For interactive use.
cols

Only meaningful for lists, data.frames or data.tables. A character vector of column names (or numbers) of x.
prefix

Either NULL (default) or a character vector of length=1 which is prefixed to the row ids, returning a character vector (instead of an integer vector).

Value

When prefix = NULL, an integer vector with same length as NROW(x), else a character vector with the value in prefix prefixed to the ids obtained.

See also

dcast.data.table, rleid

Examples

DT = data.table(x=c(20,10,10,30,30,20), y=c("a", "a", "a", "b", "b", "b"), z=1:6)

rowid(DT$x) # 1,1,2,1,2,2
#> [1] 1 1 2 1 2 2
rowidv(DT, cols="x") # same as above
#> [1] 1 1 2 1 2 2

rowid(DT$x, prefix="group") # prefixed with 'group'
#> [1] "group1" "group1" "group2" "group1" "group2" "group2"

rowid(DT$x, DT$y) # 1,1,2,1,2,1
#> [1] 1 1 2 1 2 1
rowidv(DT, cols=c("x","y")) # same as above
#> [1] 1 1 2 1 2 1
DT[, .(N=seq_len(.N)), by=.(x,y)]$N # same as above
#> [1] 1 1 2 1 2 1

# convenient usage with dcast
dcast(DT, x ~ rowid(x, prefix="group"), value.var="z")
#>     x group1 group2
#> 1: 10      2      3
#> 2: 20      1      6
#> 3: 30      4      5
#     x group1 group2
# 1: 10      2      3
# 2: 20      1      6
# 3: 30      4      5