The mcode package aims to provide tools for easily merging and recoding across multiple variables, tasks that are commonly needed in the analysis of complex social science data (e.g., survey forms with branching, experimental designs involving analogous variables in each condition, etc.). The package is inspired, in part, by the recode function of the car package, but aims to be more flexible.

So far the package includes two functions:

mergeNA merges vectors with mutually exclusive missingness. For example:

> mergeNA(c(1,2,NA,NA,NA),c(NA,NA,NA,4,5)) [1] 1 2 NA 4 5 

This is useful when it is necessary to merge a potentially large number of variables (e.g., from branched survey questions) into a single variable.

mcode is still experimental. Building on car::recode, the function aims to streamline recoding of variables in potentially complex ways. Where car::recode converts an input vector into an output vector following a set of recoding rules, mcode aims to recode an arbitrary number of vectors into a single output vector. For example one may want to create a categorical variable representing age and gender categories. Normally this would require two calls to recode and additional operations (e.g., *, +, or interaction). mcode will consolidate these steps into a single operation.