Remove NA values from a vector

Question

Trying ?max, you'll see that it actually has a na.rm = argument, set by default to FALSE. (That's the common default for many other R functions, including sum(), mean(), etc.)

Setting na.rm=TRUE does just what you're asking for:

d <- c(1, 100, NA, 10)
max(d, na.rm=TRUE)

If you do want to remove all of the NAs, use this idiom instead:

d <- d[!is.na(d)]

A final note: Other functions (e.g. table(), lm(), and sort()) have NA-related arguments that use different names (and offer different options). So if NA's cause you problems in a function call, it's worth checking for a built-in solution among the function's arguments. I've found there's usually one already there.

The na.omit function is what a lot of the regression routines use internally:

vec <- 1:1000
vec[runif(200, 1, 1000)] <- NA
max(vec)
#[1] NA
max( na.omit(vec) )
#[1] 1000

Use discard from purrr (works with lists and vectors).

discard(v, is.na) 

The benefit is that it is easy to use pipes; alternatively use the built-in subsetting function [:

v %>% discard(is.na)
v %>% `[`(!is.na(.))

Note that na.omit does not work on lists:

> x <- list(a=1, b=2, c=NA)
> na.omit(x)
$a
[1] 1

$b
[1] 2

$c
[1] NA

?max shows you that there is an extra parameter na.rm that you can set to TRUE.

Apart from that, if you really want to remove the NAs, just use something like:

myvec[!is.na(myvec)]

You can call max(vector, na.rm = TRUE). More generally, you can use the na.omit() function.