Say I have a data.frame object:

df <- data.frame(name=c('black','black','black','red','red'),
                 type=c('chair','chair','sofa','sofa','plate'),
                 num=c(4,5,12,4,3))

Now I want to count the number of rows (observations) of for each combination of name and type. This can be done like so:

table(df[ , c("name","type")])

or possibly also with plyr, (though I am not sure how).

However, how do I get the results incorporated into the original data frame? So that the results will look like this:

df
#    name  type num count
# 1 black chair   4     2
# 2 black chair   5     2
# 3 black  sofa  12     1
# 4   red  sofa   4     1
# 5   red plate   3     1

where count now stores the results from the aggregation.

A solution with plyr could be interesting to learn as well, though I would like to see how this is done with base R.

r count aggregate r-faq
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