On 4/22/2007 5:46 PM, ivo welch wrote: > dear R wizards --- would it make sense for names(d$columnname) to be > "columnname"? I can preserve the columnname through x=subset(dataset, > select="columnname"), of course, but it would seem that x=d$columnname > could also do this. No? Sincerely, /iaw
If I understand what you're asking, I don't think so. d$columnname extracts an element of the list d. It's typically some sort of vector, and vectors don't know what their own name is. names(d$columnname) looks for a names attribute on that vector. If it doesn't have one, you'll get NULL. There are plenty of functions in R which depend on the form of the argument passed to them, not just its value, but we shouldn't add more without a very good reason. The change you ask for would mess up the following calculation: > x <- 1:26 > names(x) <- letters > d <- list(columnname=x) > names(d$columnname) [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l" "m" "n" "o" "p" "q" "r" [19] "s" "t" "u" "v" "w" "x" "y" "z" Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ [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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
