Assign or reorder factor levels manually

This is a low level function that allows you to convert a character vector into a factor and manually assign the levels, or to manually reassign the levels of a factor vector. While very similar to factor() a key difference is that this keeps the original attributes of x.

Usage

refactor(x, new_levels, ordered = NA)

Arguments

x

A factor or character vector

new_levels

A list of the new levels of the factor

ordered

Logical. Specifies if the factor is ordered. Default is NA, which checks to see if the factor is ordered and then uses that to determine if it should be ordered

Value

A factor variable of the same length as x

Examples

# load the dplyr library so we can use `mutate()`
library(dplyr)

# let's manually reorder the factor levels of `edu_f` from the `test_data`
# data set so it's in a random order that I specify
test_data <- test_data %>%
  mutate(
    # make the new reordered variable
    edu_f_reordered = refactor(
      # specify we are reordering the `edu_f` variable
      x = edu_f,
      new_levels = c(
        "Bachelor's Degree",
        "Graduate Degree",
        "High School or Less",
        "Some College"
      )
    )
  )

# let's check the new levels
levels(test_data$edu_f_reordered)
#> [1] "Bachelor's Degree"   "Graduate Degree"     "High School or Less"
#> [4] "Some College"       
# and compare them to the original levels
levels(test_data$edu_f)
#> [1] "High School or Less" "Some College"        "Bachelor's Degree"  
#> [4] "Graduate Degree"