Overview

R uses factors to handle categorical variables, variables that have a fixed and known set of possible values. Factors are also helpful for reordering character vectors to improve display. The goal of the forcats package is to provide a suite of tools that solve common problems with factors, including changing the order of levels or the values. Some examples include:

  • fct_reorder(): Reordering a factor by another variable.
  • fct_infreq(): Reordering a factor by the frequency of values.
  • fct_relevel(): Changing the order of a factor by hand.
  • fct_lump(): Collapsing the least/most frequent values of a factor into “other”.

You can learn more about each of these in vignette("forcats"). If you’re new to factors, the best place to start is the chapter on factors in R for Data Science.

More resources

For a history of factors, I recommend stringsAsFactors: An unauthorized biography by Roger Peng and stringsAsFactors = <sigh> by Thomas Lumley. If you want to learn more about other approaches to working with factors and categorical data, I recommend Wrangling categorical data in R, by Amelia McNamara and Nicholas Horton.

Getting help

If you encounter a clear bug, please file a minimal reproducible example on github. For questions and other discussion, please use community.rstudio.com.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the ‘forcats’ project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.