Jon Stearley wrote:
On Jun 1, 2005, at 11:22 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
These functions convert their first argument to a vector (or
array) of character strings which have a common format (as is done
by 'print'), fulfilling 'length(format*(x, *)) == length(x)'. The
trimming with 'trim = TRUE' is useful when the strings are to be
used for plot 'axis' annotation.
i saw this but
class(x) # [1] "data.frame"
y<-format(x)
class(y) # [1] "data.frame"
confused me, let alone y<-as.character(format(x)). i'm still an R
newbie...
I'll try to make it clearer.
I think you've got a right to be confused, newbie or not.
format.data.frame() doesn't seem to follow the documentation, either
before or after my change to the docs. The result of format(x) is not a
vector or array or even a data.frame of character strings, it's a
data.frame of factors.
I'm not sure this is a reasonable thing to do. Does anyone else have
an opinion on this?
My initial feeling is that format() on a data.frame should return a
data.frame of character vectors, it shouldn't convert them to factors.
One should be able to expect that format(x)[1,1] gives a character
value, rather than the underlying factor encoding as it does in this
example:
> x <- data.frame(a=rnorm(5), b=rnorm(5))
> y <- format(x, digits=3)
> y
a b
1 -1.007 -0.525
2 -0.570 1.128
3 0.162 1.729
4 -1.642 -0.485
5 0.381 0.621
> cat(y[1,1],"\n")
2
Duncan Murdoch
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