Steve,
I like your suggestion a lot. I can see putting column specification to
good use.
As for the argument name, perhaps
'use.columns'
And where a value of NULL or FALSE will yield same results as
`unique.data.frame`
use.columns=key(x) # default behavior
use.columns=c("col1name", "col7name") #etc
use.columns=NULL
Thanks as always,
Rick
On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Steve Lianoglou <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I actually want to revisit the fix I made here.
>
> Instead of having `use.key` in the signature to unique.data.table (and
> duplicated.data.table) to be:
>
> function(x,
> incomparables=FALSE,
> tolerance=.Machine$double.eps ^ 0.5,
> use.key=TRUE, ...)
>
> How about we switch out use.key for a parameter that specifies the
> column names to use in the uniqueness check, which defaults to key(x)
> to keep backwards compatibility.
>
> For argument's sake (like that?), lets call this parameter `columns`
> (by.columns? with.columns? whatever) so:
>
> function(x,
> incomparables=FALSE,
> tolerance=.Machine$double.eps ^ 0.5,
> columns=key(x), ...)
>
> Then:
>
> (1) leaving it alone is the backward compatibile behavior;
> (2) Perhaps setting it to NULL will use all columns, and make it
> equivalent to unique.data.frame (also the same when x has no key); and
> (3) setting it to any other combo of columns uses those columns as the
> uniqueness key and filters the rows (only) out of x accordingly.
>
> What do you folks think? Personally I think this is better on all
> accounts then just specifying to use the key or not and the only
> question in my mind is the name of the argument -- happy to hear other
> world views, however, so don't be shy.
>
> Thanks,
> -steve
>
> --
> Steve Lianoglou
> Computational Biologist
> Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
> Genentech
>
_______________________________________________
datatable-help mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/datatable-help
