That said, a question posted with a good example that can be cut and pasted directly into R is far easier to respond to, so it does seem like a good idea to help people create such things. If someone (Gabor?) wanted to create a page on how to provide good examples in posts, the people who control what gets put on the R-project site might be willing to put it up there, and a link to it from the posting guide would seem like a good idea.
Tony Plate
At Thursday 07:17 AM 8/19/2004, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
I have a suggestion for the posting guide. One problem with some posts is that
they do not provide an example that can be reproduced. I think that many
people just do not know how to easily specify some data and some technical
assistance should be provided in the posting guide. If the problem
depends on specific data they should be made aware, in the posting guide, of:
dput(x)
since that outputs object x as R code which can then be easily copied from the post and pasted into a session. If its not dependent on particular data they can generate patterned or random data IF THEY KNOW HOW but many might find it easier to just use one of the included datasets so some guidance should be provided on the contents of a few of them, e.g.
R comes with built in data sets. data() will list them, data(iris) will attach data set iris and ?iris, str(iris), summary(iris), head(iris) and dput(iris) will give more information on iris (after attaching it). The following are a few of the datasets that come with R:
iris - data frame with 4 numeric columns and one 3 level factor
nhtemp - a ts class time series
faithful - data frame with two numeric columns
warpbreaks - data with a numeric column, a 2-level factor & a 3-level factor
Also letters, LETTERS, month.abb and month.name are built in character vectors that do not require a data statement to access.
______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
