Recycling describes the concept of repeating elements of one vector to match the size of another. There are two rules that underlie the “tidyverse” recycling rules:
Vectors of size 1 will be recycled to the size of any other vector
Otherwise, all vectors must have the same size
Vectors of size 1 are recycled to the size of any other vector:
tibble(x = 1:3, y = 1L)
#> # A tibble: 3 x 2
#> x y
#> <int> <int>
#> 1 1 1
#> 2 2 1
#> 3 3 1
This includes vectors of size 0:
tibble(x = integer(), y = 1L)
#> # A tibble: 0 x 2
#> # i 2 variables: x <int>, y <int>
If vectors aren’t size 1, they must all be the same size. Otherwise, an error is thrown:
tibble(x = 1:3, y = 4:7)
#> Error in `tibble()`:
#> ! Tibble columns must have compatible sizes.
#> * Size 3: Existing data.
#> * Size 4: Column `y`.
#> i Only values of size one are recycled.
Packages in r-lib and the tidyverse generally use
vec_size_common() and
vec_recycle_common() as the backends for
handling recycling rules.
vec_size_common() returns the common size of multiple vectors, after
applying the recycling rules
vec_recycle_common() goes one step further, and actually recycles
the vectors to their common size
vec_size_common(1:3, "x")
#> [1] 3vec_recycle_common(1:3, "x")
#> [[1]]
#> [1] 1 2 3
#>
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "x" "x" "x"
vec_size_common(1:3, c("x", "y"))
#> Error:
#> ! Can't recycle `..1` (size 3) to match `..2` (size 2).
The recycling rules described here are stricter than the ones generally used by base R, which are:
If any vector is length 0, the output will be length 0
Otherwise, the output will be length max(length_x, length_y), and a
warning will be thrown if the length of the longer vector is not an
integer multiple of the length of the shorter vector.
We explore the base R rules in detail in vignette("type-size").