R loop with two break command

Question

I am trying to determine the first decimal place value different from zero. For example, in

0.0000082109314

it would be the sixth (or million-th), where there is an

8

.

I thought about a loop, but it's not working. So I'd rather ask in pseudo-code:

d = runif(100, min = 1e-10, max = 1e-5) # Toy data with 100 elements in a vector

position = rep(0, 100)                  # Starting an empty vector to place results

for(j in 1:100){                        # Looping through d

  for(i in 1:10){                       # Exponents from 1 to 10

    if(d[j]]) * 10^i >= 1)              # First power of 10 turning the value >  or = 1

    position[j] = i                     # Assign i to the position

    stop the looping through i and move on to the next j

  }

}

So I need the loop to stop replacing the

i

value as soon as the condition is fulfilled. Otherwise, any higher value of

i

will also meet the condition, and it won't return the desired first position different from zero.

I know about

break

and

next

, but how could I use them (or other commands) here?

The issue is to at some point within the loop (when the condition is met) to ask R to 1. Save the index, and 2. Move on to the next

j

.

    position = rep(0, 100)

    for(j in 1:100){

      for(i in 1:10){

    if(d[j]]) * 10^i >= 0) position[j] = i AND next

    else

    CONTINUE with i

    }

}

Answer 1

break will kick you out of your current loop. It won't go all the way to the top level so if you use it inside of the loop indexed by i it will basically just kick you to the next value for j and restart i at 1.

Just as a note if you're going to have multiple conditions inside of your if statement make sure to wrap all of them in curly braces.

for(j in 1:3){
  for(i in 1L:6L){

    # The result of this if statement is that we skip this iteration
    # when i==2.
    if(i == 2){
      next
    }

    # The result of this if statement is that we kick out of the
    # for loop indexed by i.  The result being that we reach the end
    # of the code block for the for loop indexed by j so if we aren't
    # finished iterating over all of the values for j we go to the next
    # value for j and start the for loop with i all over again.
    if(i == 5){
      break
    }

    # Just print out what i and j are equal to. We do this after the
    # if statements so any iteration that isn't stopped by the if
    # statements will end up printing a result.
    print(sprintf("i: %i j: %i", i, j))
  }
}

gives the output

[1] "i: 1 j: 1"
[1] "i: 3 j: 1"
[1] "i: 4 j: 1"
[1] "i: 1 j: 2"
[1] "i: 3 j: 2"
[1] "i: 4 j: 2"
[1] "i: 1 j: 3"
[1] "i: 3 j: 3"
[1] "i: 4 j: 3"

so by using next I skip every iteration where i==2 and by using break I stop anything for i>=5 and move on to the next value for j

If you were having troubles getting break to work with your code you'd need to post what you actually tried. There were issues other than 'break' in your code (you use d[j]] notice the mismatched square braces and I think you messed up your parenthesis on your if statement). This is what I think you wanted:

d = runif(100, min = 1e-10, max = 1e-5) # Toy data with 100 elements in a vector
position = rep(0, 100)                  # Starting an empty vector to place results
for(j in 1:100){                        # Looping through d
  for(i in 1:10){                       # Exponents from 1 to 10
    if((d[j] * 10^i) >= 1){             # First power of 10 turning the value >  or = 1
        position[j] = i                     # Assign i to the position
        break
    }
  }
}

R loop with two break command

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