Access the last value of a given vector in R

In this article, we will discuss how to access the last value of a given vector in R Programming Language. So let’s begin by first creating an example vector because to get the last value of a vector we need to first create the vector.

R

vec1 <- c("John" , "Smith", "Tina" , "Brad" , "Emma")
print(vec1)

Output:

 "John"  "Smith" "Tina"  "Brad"  "Emma" 

Our first vector is a character string with some names, now we have to extract the last name from this vector.

Method 1: Using length function

To do this task we can use the length() function from the R Language. This not only enables to find out the length of the string but also access to the elements.

Syntax: length(x)

Parameter:  x: vector

Example:

R

vec1 <- c("John" , "Smith", "Tina" , "Brad" , "Emma")
length(vec1)

Output:

[1] 5

Now, let’s use length() function to get the last element of the vector:

R

vec1 <- c("John" , "Smith", "Tina" , "Brad" , "Emma")
length(vec1)

# To Extract last element with length
vec1[length(vec1)]

Output:

[1] 5
[1] "Emma"

Method 2: Using Tail() function

To find the last element of the vector we can also use tail() function.

Again to demonstrate it let’s first create an example vector.

R

vec2 <- c(123 , 124 , 125 , 126, 128)
print(vec2)

Output:

123 124 125 126 128

We have an example vector, and we have to access its last element.

Syntax: tail()

Parameters: 

• x: data frame
• n: number of rows to be displayed

Here we are passing n=1 so that it will display only the last element in the vector.

R

vec2 <- c(123 , 124 , 125 , 126)
tail(vec2 , 1)

Output:

126