On Tuesday 14 November 2006 12:28 pm, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> This approach won't work in very many cases (but then nor will write.csv).
>
> The safest way I know is to use serialize() and unserialize(). Next to
> that, deparse(control="all") and parse(text=) are quite good and give a
> human-readable character representation.
>
> If fidelity is not the main issue, as.character and toString spring to
> mind. unlist is recursive, and is not going to come close to being
> faithful for other than very simple lists. And what if ',' is a character
> in one of the list elements?
Yes, but then one can replace ',' with something rarely used like \007.
I picked ',' because write.csv/read.csv worked before.
You are right, for storage serialize/unserialize seem best, however for
manipulation one would usually prefer a well-defined format.
best
Vladimir Dergachev
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