no “Infinities”

March 12, 2009

(This article was first published on One R Tip A Day, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Thanks to Pierre-Yves for the below useful tip!

if you have a dataset from which you want the max or min but they have to be real number and not "Inf" or "-Inf" there is a way to do it:

data <- c(-Inf, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, Inf)
max(data)
# Return Inf
min(data)
# Return -Inf
# To solve the problem I went to:
range(data, finite=TRUE)
# Then you can do
myMinimum <- range(data, finite=TRUE)[1]
myMaximum <- range(data, finite=TRUE)[2]