R - argument is of length zero in if statement

"argument is of length zero" is a very specific problem that comes from one of my least-liked elements of R. Let me demonstrate the problem:

> FALSE == "turnip"
[1] FALSE
> TRUE == "turnip"
[1] FALSE
> NA == "turnip"
[1] NA
> NULL == "turnip"
logical(0)

As you can see, comparisons to a NULL not only don't produce a boolean value, they don't produce a value at all - and control flows tend to expect that a check will produce some kind of output. When they produce a zero-length output... "argument is of length zero".

(I have a very long rant about why this infuriates me so much. It can wait.)

So, my question; what's the output of sum(is.null(data[[k]]))? If it's not 0, you have NULL values embedded in your dataset and will need to either remove the relevant rows, or change the check to

if(!is.null(data[[k]][[k2]]) & temp > data[[k]][[k2]]){
    #do stuff
}

Hopefully that helps; it's hard to tell without the entire dataset. If it doesn't help, and the problem is not a NULL value getting in somewhere, I'm afraid I have no idea.


The same error message results not only for null but also for e.g. factor(0). In this case, the query must be if(length(element) > 0 & otherCondition) or better check both cases with if(!is.null(element) & length(element) > 0 & otherCondition).


You can use isTRUE for such cases. isTRUE is the same as { is.logical(x) && length(x) == 1 && !is.na(x) && x }

If you use shiny there you could use isTruthy which covers the following cases:

  • FALSE

  • NULL

  • ""

  • An empty atomic vector

  • An atomic vector that contains only missing values

  • A logical vector that contains all FALSE or missing values

  • An object of class "try-error"

  • A value that represents an unclicked actionButton()

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