Handling missing combinations of factors in R

Question

So, I have a data frame with two factors and one numeric variable like so:

>D
f1 f2 v1 
1   A  23
2   A  45
2   B  27
     .
     .
     .

Answer 1

Two years late, but I had the same problem and came up with this plyr solution:

dat <- data.frame(f1 = factor(c(1,2,2)), f2 = factor(c("A","A","B")), v1 = c(23,45,27))

newdat <- ddply(dat, .(f1,f2), numcolwise(function(x) {if(length(x)>0) x else 0.0}), .drop=F)

> newdat
  f1 f2 v1
1  1  A 23
2  1  B  0
3  2  A 45
4  2  B 27