Get most frequent string from a data frame column

Question

I need to return the n most frequent occurrences of a string, using a multiple row data frame as the input. All the values are in the same column called \"MissingDates\"

Answer 1

It seems like you need something like:

Function

freqfunc <- function(x, n){
  tail(sort(table(unlist(strsplit(as.character(x), ", ")))), n)
}

Testing on your data set

freqfunc(gaps$MissingDates, 5) # Five most frequent dates

## 1996-12-26 1997-12-26 1998-01-02 1999-12-31 2001-09-12 
##          4          4          4          4          4