How to access the last value in a vector?

Question

Suppose I have a vector that is nested in a dataframe one or two levels. Is there a quick and dirty way to access the last value, without using the length() fu

Answer 1

Combining lindelof's and Gregg Lind's ideas:

last <- function(x) { tail(x, n = 1) }

Working at the prompt, I usually omit the n=, i.e. tail(x, 1).

Unlike last from the pastecs package, head and tail (from utils) work not only on vectors but also on data frames etc., and also can return data "without first/last n elements", e.g.

but.last <- function(x) { head(x, n = -1) }

(Note that you have to use head for this, instead of tail.)