Count number of occurences for each unique value

Question

Perhaps table is what you are after?

dummyData = rep(c(1,2, 2, 2), 25)

table(dummyData)
# dummyData
#  1  2 
# 25 75

## or another presentation of the same data
as.data.frame(table(dummyData))
#    dummyData Freq
#  1         1   25
#  2         2   75

If you have multiple factors (= a multi-dimensional data frame), you can use the dplyr package to count unique values in each combination of factors:

library("dplyr")
data %>% group_by(factor1, factor2) %>% summarize(count=n())

It uses the pipe operator %>% to chain method calls on the data frame data.

It is a one-line approach by using aggregate.

> aggregate(data.frame(count = v), list(value = v), length)

  value count
1     1    25
2     2    75

table() function is a good way to go, as Chase suggested. If you are analyzing a large dataset, an alternative way is to use .N function in datatable package.

Make sure you installed the data table package by

install.packages("data.table")

Code:

# Import the data.table package
library(data.table)

# Generate a data table object, which draws a number 10^7 times  
# from 1 to 10 with replacement
DT<-data.table(x=sample(1:10,1E7,TRUE))

# Count Frequency of each factor level
DT[,.N,by=x]

To get an un-dimensioned integer vector that contains the count of unique values, use c().

dummyData = rep(c(1, 2, 2, 2), 25) # Chase's reproducible data
c(table(dummyData)) # get un-dimensioned integer vector
 1  2 
25 75

str(c(table(dummyData)) ) # confirm structure
 Named int [1:2] 25 75
 - attr(*, "names")= chr [1:2] "1" "2"

This may be useful if you need to feed the counts of unique values into another function, and is shorter and more idiomatic than the t(as.data.frame(table(dummyData))[,2] posted in a comment to Chase's answer. Thanks to Ricardo Saporta who pointed this out to me here.

length(unique(df$col)) is the most simple way I can see.