[R] Error in rep.int(boxwex, n) : negative length vectors are not allowed

William Dunlap wdunlap at tibco.com
Thu Feb 16 03:55:00 CET 2012


It looks like a bug in bxp (which plot(factor,numeric)
calls) -- it tries to make a nGroup*nGroup long vector out of boxwex:

> f <- rep(factor(as.character(1:25000)), len=50000)
> x <- sin(1:50000)
> boxplot(split(x, f))
Error in rep.int(boxwex, n) : cannot allocate vector of length 625000000

For certain lengths that nGroup*nGroup will wrap around
to negative numbers can cause the 'no negative length vectors'
message.

Perhaps it means to do rep(boxwex, length=n).

Do you really want that many boxplots on a page?

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of R. Michael
> Weylandt
> Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2012 6:23 PM
> To: carol white
> Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] Error in rep.int(boxwex, n) : negative length vectors are not allowed
> 
> Can you give minimal reproducible code? I'm worried about using
> strings for the x axis but it'll be easier to diagnose with data and
> actual code. Use dput() to put your data sample (not your whole data
> set) in email-friendly plain text.
> 
> Michael
> 
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 10:46 AM, carol white <wht_crl at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Dear All,
> > I tried to invoke plot for a matrix of 196475 x2 dimension. I loaded the data with read.table. On
> one dimension, there are strings (names) and on the other dimension, the floats between 0 and 1. When
> I invoked plot by setting x to names and y to floats and ylim = c(0,1), I got the following error
> message:
> >
> > Error in rep.int(boxwex, n) : negative length vectors are not allowed
> >
> >
> > Does it come from the large-size dimension of the matrix and which vectors get a negative length?
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Carol
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.



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