How can I avoid replacement has length zero error - r

Question

I am trying to generate the term frequency matrix of a document and subsequently look up the frequency of a certain word in a given query in that matrix. In the end I want to sum the frequencies found of the words in the query.
However, I am coping with the error message: Error in feature[i] <- x : replacement has length zero
I do not have a lot of coding experience in general, and this is my first time working with R, thus I am having difficulties solving this error. I presume it has something to do with a null-value. I already tried to avoid the nested for-loop with an apply function because I thought that might help (not sure though), but I could not quite get the hang of how to convert the for-loop into an apply function.
termfreqname <- function(queries,docs){
n <- length(queries)
feature <- vector(length=n)
for(i in 1:n){
query <- queries[i]
documentcorpus <- c(docs[i])
tdm <- TermDocumentMatrix(tm_corpus) #creates the term frequency matrix per document
m <- sapply(strsplit(query, " "), length) #length of the query in words
totalfreq <- list(0) #initialize list
freq_counter <- rowSums(as.matrix(tdm)) #counts the occurrence of a given word in the tdm matrix
for(j in 1:m){
freq <- freq_counter[word(query,j)] #finds frequency of each word in the given query, in the term frequency matrix
totalfreq[[j]] <- freq #adds this frequency to position j in the list
}
x <- reduce(totalfreq,'+') #sums all the numbers in the list
feature[i] <- x #adds this number to feature list
feature
}
}

Answer 1

It depends on your needs, but bottom line you need to add some if statement. How you use it depends on whether you want the default value of the vector to persist. In your code, while feature starts as a logical vector, it is likely coerced to integer or numeric once you overwrite its first value with a number. In that case, the default value in all positions of the vector will be 0 (or 0L, if integer). That's going to influence your decision on how to use the if statement.
if (length(x)) feature[i] <- x
This will only attempt to overwrite the ith value of feature if the x objects has length (that's equivalent to if (length(x) > 0)). In this case, since the default value in the vector will be zero, this means when you are done that you will not be able to distinguish between an element known to be 0 and an element that failed to find anything.
The alternative (and my preference/recommendation):
feature[i] <- if (length(x)) x else NA
In this case, when you are done, you can clearly distinguish between known-zero (0) and uncertain/unknown values (NA). When doing math operations on that vector, you might want/need na.rm=TRUE ... but it all depends on your use.
BTW, as MartinGal noted, your use of reduce(totalfreq, '+') is a little flawed: 'x' may not be (is not?) recognized as a known function. The first fix to this is to use backticks around the function, so
totalfreq <- 5:7
reduce(totalfreq, '+')
# NULL
reduce(totalfreq, `+`)
# [1] 18
sum(totalfreq)
# [1] 18
There the last is the much-more-preferred method. Why? With a vector of length 4, for instance, it takes the first two and adds them, then takes that result and adds it to the third, then takes that result and adds to the fourth. Three operations. When you have 100 elements, it will make 99 individual additions. sum does it once, and this does have an effect on performance (asymptotically).
However, if totalfreq is instead a list, then this changes slightly:
totalfreq <- as.list(5:7)
reduce(totalfreq, `+`)
# [1] 18
sum(totalfreq)
# Error in sum(totalfreq) : invalid 'type' (list) of argument
# x
sum(unlist(totalfreq))
# [1] 18
The reduce code still works, and the sum by itself fails, but we can unlist the list first, effectively creating a vector, and then call sum on that. Much much faster asymptotically. And perhaps clearer, more declarative.
(I'm assuming purrr::reduce, btw ...)