How to extend `==` behavior to vectors that include NAs?

Question

I\'ve completely failed at searching for other r-help or Stack Overflow discussion of this specific issue. Sorry if it\'s somewhere obvious. I believe that I\'m just lo

Answer 1

How about using identical() wrapped in mapply()

a <- c( 1 , 2 , 3 )
b <- c( 1 , 2 , 4 )
mapply(identical,a,b)
#[1]  TRUE  TRUE FALSE

a <- c( 1 , NA , 3 ) 
b <- c( 1 , NA , 4 )
mapply(identical,a,b)
#[1]  TRUE  TRUE FALSE

a <- c( 1 , NA , 3 ) 
b <- c( 1 , 2 , 4 )
mapply(identical,a,b)
#[1]  TRUE FALSE FALSE

Also, if you need to compare results from calculations you could get rid of identical() and go with isTRUE(all.equal()) like so

mapply(FUN=function(x,y){isTRUE(all.equal(x,y))}, a, b)

which gives the same outcomes, but can better deal with rounding issues. Such as

a<-.3/3
b<-.1
mapply(FUN=function(x,y){isTRUE(all.equal(x,y))}, a, b)
#[1] TRUE

mapply(identical,a,b)
#[1] FALSE

I think this last example would mess up a lot of the proposed solutions - but switching to all.equal instead of == would likely work for all of them.