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What is is.na() function in R?

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Jul 17, 2025
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The is.na() function in R
Syntax
Parameters
Code

The is.na() function in R#

is.na() is used to deal with missing values in the dataset or data frame. We can use this method to check the NA field in a data frame and help to fill them. To deal with missing values, one's can fill empty fields by NA's using fill.NAs().

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Note: We can also use which() function to extract exact indexes of NA values.

Syntax#

is.nan(x)

Parameters#

It takes the following value as an agument:x: It can either be a vector or a data frame.

Return valueIt returns the boolean or logical value either TRUE or FALSE.

Code#

Let’s discuss is.na() function with code examples:

# is.na in r example
x = c(1, 2, NA, 4, NA, 6, 7)
# invoking is.na() to get NA's indexes
print(is.na(x))
# show indexes of NA's
print(which(is.na(x)))

We can also use is.na() to find the missing values in a dataframe and then replace them with new value.

Find missing values.

# Create a vector with missing values
df <- c(1, 2, NA, 4, NA, 6)
# Filter out missing values
new_df <- df[!is.na(df)] # new data frame with no missing values
print(new_df)
# Output: 1 2 4 6

Replace missing values with other values.

df <- c(1, 2, NA, 4, NA, 6)# Replace missing values with 0
df_new<- ifelse(is.na(df), 0, df)
print(df_new)
# Output: 1 2 0 4 0 6

Count the number of missing values.

df <- c(1, 2, NA, 4, NA, 6)
count <- sum(is.na(df))
print(count)


Written By:
Areeba Haider

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