Where is the Min() or Max() or first TRUE or FALSE ?

Determines the location, i.e., index of the (first) minimum or maximum of a numeric (or logical) vector.


numeric (logical, integer or double) vector or an R object for which the internal coercion to double works whose min or max is searched for.


Missing and NaN values are discarded.

an integer or on 64-bit platforms, if length(x) =: n\(\ge 2^{31}\) an integer valued double of length 1 or 0 (iff x has no non-NAs), giving the index of the first minimum or maximum respectively of x.

If this extremum is unique (or empty), the results are the same as (but more efficient than) which(x == min(x, na.rm = TRUE)) or which(x == max(x, na.rm = TRUE)) respectively.

Logical x -- First TRUE or FALSE

For a logical vector x with both FALSE and TRUE values, which.min(x) and which.max(x) return the index of the first FALSE or TRUE, respectively, as FALSE < TRUE. However, match(FALSE, x) or match(TRUE, x) are typically preferred, as they do indicate mismatches.

See Also

which, max.col, max, etc.

Use arrayInd(), if you need array/matrix indices instead of 1D vector ones.

which.is.max in package nnet differs in breaking ties at random (and having a ‘fuzz’ in the definition of ties).

  • which.min
  • which.max
library(base) # NOT RUN { x <- c(1:4, 0:5, 11) which.min(x) which.max(x) ## it *does* work with NA's present, by discarding them: presidents[1:30] range(presidents, na.rm = TRUE) which.min(presidents) # 28 which.max(presidents) # 2 ## Find the first occurrence, i.e. the first TRUE, if there is at least one: x <- rpois(10000, lambda = 10); x[sample.int(50, 20)] <- NA ## where is the first value >= 20 ? which.max(x >= 20) ## Also works for lists (which can be coerced to numeric vectors): which.min(list(A = 7, pi = pi)) ## -> c(pi = 2L) # }

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