one function a day: filldown

Sometimes we need to fill the values in a vector with previous values when data is missing. I wrote some convoluted code to do that but, as usual, someone solved the very same problem in an elegant way.

Here comes the function filldown from package MESS

library(MESS)

myVector <- c(3, NA, NA, NA, 4, NA, NA, 7, NA, NA)

filled.vector <- filldown(myVector)

filled.vector
 [1] 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 7 7 7

and done!