Replace 0 with NA in R (Example) | Changing Zero in Data Frame & Vector


In this article, I’ll illustrate how to substitute 0 with NA in the R programming language.

The tutorial will contain this:

Let’s dive into it!


Creation of Example Data

We’ll use the following data frame for the example of this R programming tutorial:

data <- data.frame(x1 = c(2, 0, 7, 4, 0, 5),    # Create example data
                   x2 = c(0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0))
data                                            # Print example data
# x1 x2
# 1  2  0
# 2  0  0
# 3  7  0
# 4  4  1
# 5  0  1
# 6  5  0

Our example data consists of six rows and two variables x1 and x2. Some of the values of these two rows are zero.


Example: Replace 0 with NA

Replacing 0 by NA in R is a simple task. We simply have to run the following R code:

data[data == 0] <- NA                           # Replace 0 with NA
data                                            # Print updated data
#   x1 x2
# 1  2 NA
# 2 NA NA
# 3  7 NA
# 4  4  1
# 5 NA  1
# 6  5 NA

As you can see based on the RStudio console output, we replaced all 0 values with NA values. Note that we could apply the same code to a vector or a single data frame column.


Video, Further Resources & Summary

Do you want to learn more about the manipulation of data in R? Then you could have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. I show the R code of this tutorial in the video.


The YouTube video will be added soon.


In addition, you might want to have a look at the other tutorials on You can find a selection of tutorials below:


This article explained how to change zeros in a data frame or vector to not available values in the R programming language. Tell me about it in the comments section, in case you have any further questions and/or comments.


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