dataframe - R - add column that counts sequentially within groups but repeats for duplicates

Question

I'm looking for a solution to add the column "desired_result" preferably using dplyr and/or ave(). See the data frame here, where the group is "section" and the unique instances I want my "desired_results" column to count sequentially are in "exhibit":

structure(list(section = c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 2L), exhibit = structure(c(1L, 
2L, 3L, 3L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 3L), .Label = c("a", "b", "c"), class = "factor"), 
desired_result = c(1L, 2L, 3L, 3L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 3L)), .Names = c("section", 
"exhibit", "desired_result"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, 
-8L))

Answer 1

I've recently pushed a function rleid() to data.table (currently available on the development version, 1.9.5), which does exactly this. If you're interested, you can install it by following this.

require(data.table) # 1.9.5, for `rleid()`
require(dplyr)
DF %>% 
  group_by(section) %>% 
  mutate(desired_results=rleid(exhibit))

#   section exhibit desired_result desired_results
# 1       1       a              1               1
# 2       1       b              2               2
# 3       1       c              3               3
# 4       1       c              3               3
# 5       2       a              1               1
# 6       2       b              2               2
# 7       2       b              2               2
# 8       2       c              3               3