Extracting off-diagonal elements of a matrix in R

Question

The off-diagonal elements of the mat_rix below are all 0 s.

To extract the off-diagonal elements, I use a solution that I found on SO: odiag <- function(x) x[(n <- nrow(x))^2-(1:n)*(n-1)]

But when I use odiag(mat_rix) , the output contains non-0 elements. I wonder what's the problem and how to fix it?

x="
 0.4850377 0.000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.510766 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.000000 0.05767389 0.00000000 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.000000 0.00000000 0.07539841 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.3134951 0.000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.0000000 0.679101 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.0000000 0.000000 0.5067036 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.1829717 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.3722585 0.0000000 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.3907239 0.0000000
 0.0000000 0.000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0287955"

mat_rix <- as.matrix(read.table(text=x))

odiag(mat_rix)

[1] 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.679101 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000

Answer 1

If we need the off-diagonal, create a function where the row index is not equal to col umn index

odiag <- function(x) x[col(x) != row(x)]
odiag(mat_rix)

If we need the values that are one up/one down from the diagonal

odiag2 <- function(x, offdiag = "up") {
    ind <- if(offdiag == "up") -1 else 1
    x[row(x) - col(x) == ind]
}
odiag2(mat_rix, "up")
[1] 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0