Creating a sequence starting with 0

Question

I like to use the seq() command in R to create a sequence starting at zero. but when I type e.g.

seq(0:14)

I get the following output:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

As others have said you want 0:14 or seq(from=0,to=14) The reason you get your undesired result is also worth noting.

In this case, the colon operator on its own (as described in ?':') is generating the desired regular sequence of integers, which you are then supplying to seq().

seq() is guessing that you mean seq(along.with = 0:14) which returns a sequence of the same length as the thing you supplied. And of course it is using the default from = 1. So it gives you a sequence of fifteen integers starting at one. It's roughly analogous to this:

(x <- 0:14)
# [1]  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14

seq(along.with = x, from = 1)
# [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Despite causing the error you got, this along.with functionality is clearly useful for making sequences that are the same length as some vector/list/matrix:

seq(c(1,"w",5,6,NA))
# [1] 1 2 3 4 5

And we can't say ?seq didn't warn us about naming our arguments:

The interpretation of the unnamed arguments of seq and seq.int is not standard, and it is recommended always to name the arguments when programming.

Answer 2

You mean to do

0:14

or

seq(0, 14)