Difference Between & and && in R

In R Programming Language, “&” and “&&” are two logical operators used to combine logical expressions. However, they behave differently in terms of how they evaluate expressions and return results.

The “&” operator evaluates both expressions and returns a vector of the same length as the inputs, where each element is the result of a logical “and” operation. This means that it returns TRUE only if both expressions are TRUE and FALSE.

• The “&” operator performs the element-wise comparison and returns a logical vector of the same length as its input.
•  the “&&” operator evaluates only the first element of the input and returns the single logical value.

The “&” and “&&” operators are used for logical operations. The &” and “&&” are two logical operators used to evaluate logical expressions.

& Operator in R

The “&” operator is a logical operator used to evaluate logical expressions. The “element-wise logical AND” operator because it compares two logical vectors element by element and returns the new logical vector indicating which elements are TRUE in both vectors.

R

x <- c(TRUE, FALSE, TRUE)
y <- c(FALSE, TRUE, TRUE)
x & y

Output:

[1] FALSE FALSE  TRUE

&& Operator in R

The “&&” operator is the “logical AND” operator. It is used to evaluate two logical expressions and return a single logical value indicating whether both expressions are TRUE or not.

R

x <- 5
if (x > 0 && x < 10) {
  print("x is positive and less than 10")
} else {
  print("x is either negative or greater than 10")
}

Output:

[1] "x is positive and less than 10"

Now let’s look at one more example using the “&&” operator.

R

# "&" operator
x <- 7
y <- 11
z <- 17

x < y & y < z

# "&" operator
x < y && y < z

Output:

TRUE
TRUE

Difference between & and && in R

	&	&&
Input	Two logical vectors, matrices, or arrays of the same length and dimension.	Two logical expressions or scalar values.
Output	A logical vector of the same length and dimension as the inputs.	A single logical value.
Evaluation	Element-wise on both inputs, even if they are of different lengths.	Short-circuited: Only the second expression is evaluated if the first is TRUE.
Use in if statements	Returns a warning if the length of the inputs is not a multiple of each other.	Returns an error if the length of the inputs is greater than one.
Use in loops	Returns a logical vector of the same length as the inputs.	Returns a single logical value, so not typically used in loops.