This video is about the most important function in all R, the str function. This function is really handy. It's really useful. I use it all the time. And you can use it in all kinds of situations just to help you out, to look at R objects. So the idea behind the str function is, is that it's suppose to compactly display the internal structure of an R object, so str, str, you can think of as being, meaning structure. So it's a very simple diagnostic function. It's very versatile. And, the idea's that it's, you can use it as, like, an alternative to summary. You want to look at an object, and see, and see you know, what is it. And, what's in it. You can use summary which will often be very useful. But str is another option. It's partic, particularly well suited for compactly displaying large lists which may contain nested lists. And also and, and its goal is to produce roughly one line of output per basic object. For example so if you give it a simple object like a vector, it'll give you one line of output backup. It will print it to the console. And so the basic goal of str is to answer the question, what's in this object? I'm going to start up R here and I'm going to just give a little demonstration of how the str function can work. So here, you can apply str to itself and see it's a function that takes an object. It can take any R object. So, so you can apply str to other functions. So let's say I want to know what the lm function does. So here, what it gives you it gives you the, the function arguments for the lm function. So just, so here you can see it's a very brief summary, you know, take the first argument's a formula, the second argument's data, et cetera. I can look at maybe ls function and it gives me, you know, what are the arguments for the LS function? So if you want to look at some data, though. Let's say I'm going to generate some normal random variables here, 100 of them, let's say mean two variant, and standard deviation four. Now one thing you can do is, is just do summary on x, and that will give you like a five number summary plus the mean. So you get the mean, median that is 25th, 75th percentiles and the min and the max. So that gives you a rough sense of kind of what the range is and how it varies. You can also call str on x and it will give you a little bit more information. So it'll give you a one line output. It tells you that x is a numeric vector. There are 100 elements. And then, and it'll give you the first five numbers in this vector. So you can get a sense of kind of what the data looked like. So you can apply str to other types of vectors. So here I can create like a factor variable. So this is the factor that has 40 levels and each one is repeated ten times so if I call str on it. And it'll give me a one line output again. So here, it tells me it's a factor. It's got 40 levels. The level, the first four of them are named 1, 2, 3 and 4. So that's not particularly interesting. And then here, I've said the first couple of elements of this factor are all in the, k-, all have the label, one. You can also call summary on a factor, and you can see that the output's a little bit different. And what this does is it, is it gives you the number of elements in each of the 40 different levels. So that's another piece of data that's not quite as compact of output as str gives you. So you can use str for other types of data types. So here, I can, I can load like a data frame. Here's the airquality data set. So, you know, if I look at the airquality data set, I can use the head function to look at the first six rows, or I can call str to get a little some different output. So here, it tells me it's a data frame. It tells me that there's a 153 observations, so 153 rows in this data frame with, of six variables and then for each variable, it, it gives me a little output. So it tells me that the name of the first variable is Ozone. It's an integer. Variable and, and here are the first could of observations. You can see there are some NAs there, so that's useful to know. The second variable is called Solar.R, and it's also an integer, and you can see the, the first couple of values. So, the Str output here is very useful for kind of just getting a quick examination of data that you might have in R and what the structure of different R objects is. We can take this a little bit farther, so for example, we could create a little matrix here. I'm going to put some random normals in there. That will be a 10 by 10 matrix. I'll call str on m. See, it will give me a little bit more information. So now it knows that it's a matrix. It'll say that it's a, it's a two-dimensional array. That it's got 10 rows and 10 columns. And here are the first couple of elements. So that's going to be the first column that you're seeing there. So if I, so if I just print out the first column here, you'll see that it, that's what it's giving me in the str output. The last thing I'll do here is create a little list by using the split function and see how str can look at the list and give a compact summary of it. So, I'm just going to take this air quality data frame And split it by the month. So here I go to airquality, going to split it by the month variable. So now if I call str on S you'll see, well there's a little bit of output that flies by. You see now this is a list, that contains five different data frames where each data frame corresponds to the data for a given month. So the months are, the data are only collected over five different months so that's why there's only five elements. So here you can see that the month, the month five, which is May has 31 observations on six variables and that's a little bit of what the data looked like. And you'll see for June, here, there's 30 observations on six variables again, same six variables, of course. And that's what the data look like there. And then for July, the data are here. And August and September. So you can see the you can have a representation of this split list that's kind of, that's not as compact as it was before but it's about as compact as you can make it and str will provide a very nice summary. You can take a quick look at the data. See if there's any problems. See if there's missing values and get a sense of what to do next. So that's the str function. I'll, I'll repeat again, I think it's the most useful function in all of R and you can use it in all cases. I encourage you to use it anytime you have an R object and, you don't know what's there.
