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R - floor division operator example



The example below show the usage of floor division(%/%) operator in different scenarios.

Quotient when dividing by a scalar

When used a vector or a matrix, it acts on each element of it.

#first operand
x1 <- 10
v1 <- c(10, 20, 30)
m1 <- matrix(c(10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60), nrow=2)

#second operand
x2 <- 7

#quotient when dividing two scalars 
#(single element atomic vectors) 
print(x1 %/% x2)
#quotient when dividing a vector by a scalar
print(v1 %/% x2)
#quotient when dividing a matrix by a scalar
cat("\n")
print(m1 %/% x2)

The output of the above code will be:

[1] 1
[1] 1 2 4

     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    4    7
[2,]    2    5    8

Quotient when dividing by a vector

When a vector is divided by another vector, their length should be same or length of longer vector should be multiple of length of shorter vector. Similarly, when a matrix is divided by a vector, the length of longer object should be multiple of length of shorter object.

Please note that, When a matrix is divided by a vector, elements are divided column-wise.

#first operand
x1 <- 10
v1 <- c(10, 20, 30)
m1 <- matrix(c(10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60), nrow=2)

#second operand
v2 <- c(5, 6, 7)

#quotient when dividing a scalar (single 
#element atomic vector) by a vector
print(x1 %/% v2)
#quotient when dividing two vectors
print(v1 %/% v2)
#quotient when dividing a matrix by a vector
cat("\n")
print(m1 %/% v2)

The output of the above code will be:

[1] 2 1 1
[1] 2 3 4

     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    2    4    8
[2,]    3    8    8

Quotient when dividing by a matrix

When a matrix is divided by another matrix, their dimension should be same or dimension of bigger matrix should be multiple of dimension of smaller matrix.

#first operand
x1 <- 10
v1 <- c(10, 20, 30)
m1 <- matrix(c(10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60), nrow=2)

#second operand
m2 <- matrix(c(5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), nrow=2)

#quotient when dividing a scalar (single 
#element atomic vector) by a matrix
print(x1 %/% m2)
#quotient when dividing a vector by a matrix
cat("\n")
print(v1 %/% m2)
#quotient when dividing two matrices
cat("\n")
print(m1 %/% m2)

The output of the above code will be:

     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    2    1    1
[2,]    1    1    1

     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    2    4    2
[2,]    3    1    3

     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    2    4    5
[2,]    3    5    6

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