Hi, On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Jeff Newmiller <jdnew...@dcn.davis.ca.us> wrote: > I don't know if my recent post on this prompted your post, but I don't see > much to argue with in your discussion. I find factors to be useful for > managing display and some kinds of analysis. > > However, I find them mostly a handicap when importing, merging, and handling > data QC. Therefore I delay conversion until late in the game... but usually I > do eventually convert in most cases.
Agreed here -- I actually haven't been tuned into any such recent conversation (if there was one), but if I were a gambling man, I'd bet that the majority of the problems people have with factors can probably be boiled down to the fact that the default value for stringsAsFactors is TRUE. I like factors -- that said, I am annoyed by them at times, but I still like them. Also, Bert mentioned that he thinks they save space over characters -- I believe that this is no longer true, but I'm not certain. -steve -- Steve Lianoglou Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center | Weill Medical College of Cornell University Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.