How to Find Index of an Element in a R Vector

1. Use the which() Function to Find the Index of an Element in R
2. Use the match() Function to Find the Index of an Element in R

A vector is one of the fundamental data structures in R. It is used to store elements in a sequence, but unlike lists, all elements in a vector must be of the same data type.

Every element in the vector has a particular position or index. It is possible to know the index of any element using built-in functions in R like which(), and match().

In this tutorial, we will find the index of element 7 and 8 of the following vector:

x <- c(5,6,8,9,7,5,7,8)

Use the which() Function to Find the Index of an Element in R

The which() function returns a vector with the index (or indexes) of the element which matches the logical vector (in this case ==).

For example:

x <- c(5,6,8,9,7,5,7,8)
which(x == 7)
[1] 5 7

Notice that since 7 is present twice in the vector, both of its positions are returned. If we want the first index of 7, we can simply do it as shown below:

which(x == 7)[1]
[1] 5

We can also use the which() function to find the indexes of multiple elements using the %in% parameter, which returns a vector with a True value for every element that matches.

which(x %in% c(7,8))
[1] 3 5 7 8

As you can see, all the positions of both 7 and 8 are returned.

Use the match() Function to Find the Index of an Element in R

The match() function is very similar to the which() function. It returns a vector with the first index (if the element is at more than one position as in our case) of the element and is considered faster than the which() function.

x <- c(5,6,8,9,7,5,7,8)
match(7,x)
[1] 5

We can also use it for finding the first index of multiple elements, as shown below:

x <- c(5,6,8,9,7,5,7,8)
match(c(7,8),x)
[1] 5 3

Note that only the first positions of both 7 and 8 are returned by the match() function. That is why the match() is considered to be faster of the two methods for such situations where only the first index is required.