Strange behavior for filtering in data.table

Question

I've stumbled upon weird data table i behavior that returns a row with NA s where I would expect an empty data table. See:

a = data.table(a = 1, d = NA) 
a[!is.na(a) & d == "3"] 
#     a  d
# 1: NA NA

I would expect an empty data table as a result here. Compare to:

a = data.table(a = c(1,2), d = c(NA,3))
a[!is.na(a) & d == "3"] 
#    a d
# 1: 2 3

This one does not produce an extra row with NA values, though.
Is this a bug in data.table or there's some logic underlying this behavior that someone could explain?

Answer 1

Don't know if it's a bug or not, but it seems it has to do with the type of your variable d.

a = data.table(a = 1, d = NA) 
str(a)
# Classes ‘data.table’ and 'data.frame':    1 obs. of  2 variables:
#  $ a: num 1
#  $ d: logi NA
#  - attr(*, ".internal.selfref")=<externalptr> 

a[!is.na(a) & d == "3"] # this returns NAs
#     a  d
# 1: NA NA

a[!is.na(a) & !is.na(d)] # this returns nothing
# Empty data.table (0 rows) of 2 cols: a,d

This one also works:

a = data.table(a = 1, d = 4) 
str(a)
# Classes ‘data.table’ and 'data.frame':    1 obs. of  2 variables:
#  $ a: num 1
#  $ d: num 4
#  - attr(*, ".internal.selfref")=<externalptr> 

a[!is.na(a) & d == "3"]
#     Empty data.table (0 rows) of 2 cols: a,d

Looks like if a variable is of logical type it can't be compared to another type and returns NAs. However, with the dplyr package it seems to work:

library(dplyr)

a = data.table(a = 1, d = NA) 
a %>% filter(!is.na(a) & d == "3")
# Empty data.table (0 rows) of 2 cols: a,d

The same with the subset command:

subset(a, !is.na(a) & d == "3")
# Empty data.table (0 rows) of 2 cols: a,d

Answer 2

Thanks for the ping @SergiiZaskaleta. I forgot to update this question, but this has been fixed a while ago, with this commit .

From NEWS :

42. Subsets using logical expressions in i never returns all- NA rows. Edge case DT[NA] is now fixed, #1252 . Thanks to @sergiizaskaleta.