# Calculate the Range in R

You need to calculate the range of a numerical dataset in R.

## Step-by-step tutorial

Use the diff and range functions from the base package. The range function actually returns the minimum and maximum values, so we need diff to get their difference. (You could just manually subtract too, but diff is conveninent.)

### Vector data

> diff(range(c(4, 5, 6, 2, 8, 8, 4)))
[1] 6

### Data frame

> precip.df <- read.csv("precip-central-park.csv")
YEAR  JAN  FEB  MAR  APR  MAY  JUN  JUL  AUG  SEP  OCT  NOV  DEC ANNUAL
1 1869 2.53 6.87 4.61 1.39 4.15 4.40 3.20 1.76 2.81 6.48 2.03 5.02  45.25
2 1870 4.41 2.83 3.33 5.11 1.83 2.82 3.76 3.07 2.52 4.97 2.42 2.18  39.25
3 1871 2.07 2.72 5.54 3.03 4.04 7.05 5.57 5.60 2.34 7.50 3.56 2.24  51.26
4 1872 1.88 1.29 3.74 2.29 2.68 2.93 7.83 6.29 2.95 3.35 4.08 3.18  42.49
5 1873 5.34 3.80 2.09 4.16 3.69 1.28 4.61 9.56 3.14 2.73 4.63 2.96  47.99
6 1874 5.33 2.04 2.12 8.77 2.24 2.78 5.06 2.43 8.24 1.70 2.30 2.82  45.83
> diff(range(precip.df[, "JUL"]))
[1] 11.45

### Tibble

> library(readr)
Parsed with column specification:
cols(
YEAR = col_double(),
JAN = col_double(),
FEB = col_double(),
MAR = col_double(),
APR = col_double(),
MAY = col_double(),
JUN = col_double(),
JUL = col_double(),
AUG = col_double(),
SEP = col_double(),
OCT = col_double(),
NOV = col_double(),
DEC = col_double(),
ANNUAL = col_double()
)
> diff(range(precip.tbl[, "JUL"]))
[1] 11.45