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I have a factor variable with countries. I have to use ! and %in% operators so that I can keep the "United States", "Switzerland", "United Kingdom" and transform the rest to "Others". But the code I am using is not working

country <- c(rep(x = "United States", 466), rep(x = "United Kingdom", 250), rep(x = "Switzerland", 520), 
             rep(x = "France", 97), rep(x = "Italy", 85), rep(x = "Germant", 39), rep(x = "Canada", 25), 
             rep(x = "Singapore", 2), rep(x = "South Africa", 9))
country

bulk <- c("United States", "Switzerland", "United Kingdom")
if(! bulk %in% country) country <- "Others"

I am expecting it to make four categories. United States, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Others. But I don't want the solution out of context of "!" and "%in%" operators.

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    "But I don't want the solution out of context of "!" and "%in%" operators" I don't understand what you mean here. What context? Are you looking for a solution that only uses ! and/or %in%? Commented Feb 18, 2019 at 6:02
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    You probably should be using ifelse. Commented Feb 18, 2019 at 6:02
  • Are you looking for country[country %in% bulk] <- "Others"? Commented Feb 18, 2019 at 6:04
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    No. it is the reciprocal of it. I want United States, United Kingdom and Switzerland as it is and the rest of the countries as Others. Commented Feb 18, 2019 at 6:20

3 Answers 3

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Solution for a vector:

country[!(country %in% bulk)] <- "Others"

Solution for a data frame:

df<-data.frame(country=country, emptycolumn=NA)
df$country<-as.character(df$country)
df$country[!(df$country %in% bulk)]<-"Others"
View(df)
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5 Comments

It is giving the following warning and makes the Other countries as NA. Warning message: In [<-.factor(*tmp*, !(data$country %in% bulk), value = c(10L, : invalid factor level, NA generated
My actual variable is in a dataframe.
You should give fully reproducible examples to avoid this kind of unrelated issues. I have added an example for a data frame, maybe edit your question so readers don't get lost. This is due to the fact that your character is converted to a factor when added to a data frame.
I suggest you simply add this line of code to your question: df<-data.frame(country=country, emptycolumn=NA)
Yes that is the case. My character vector has been changed to factor. Is there a solution now?
1

Try 

country[ ! country %in% bulk ] <- "Other"
table(country)
#-------------------------
country
         Other    Switzerland United Kingdom  United States 
           257            520            250            466

R accepts logical indices for conditional assignments.

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country <- as.data.frame(c(rep(x = "United States", 466), rep(x = "United Kingdom", 250), rep(x = "Switzerland", 520), 
             rep(x = "France", 97), rep(x = "Italy", 85), rep(x = "Germant", 39), rep(x = "Canada", 25), 
             rep(x = "Singapore", 2), rep(x = "South Africa", 9)), stringsAsFactors = F)

colnames(country) <- "country"

bulk <- c("United States", "Switzerland", "United Kingdom")

country$country[!country$country %in% bulk] <- "Other"

unique(country)

            country
1     United States
467  United Kingdom
717     Switzerland
1237          Other
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