An idea for something better than read.table
Kjetil Halvorsen wrote:
It is nice if data files can have formats not to heavily dependent on the package. What I do to read in data is having data (whith header) in, say, data.dat, and then data.R with the commands for defining factors, levels, contrast or whatever. That seems cleaner than mixing in one file data and definitions.
If you want a file format for R datasets which describe their own metadata, it might be worth thinking about defining it in XML. This probably goes a long way beyong Peter's suggestion, but presumably it could be done in the same way, by adding a header to the top of a data file. It does leave open the possibility that other statistical packages will be able to read the data and extract any meta data (storage type, variable labels, value labels, ...) they want to use. I have been thinking for a long time that it would be nice if statistical packages could exchange datasets using a common file format and (unless I have drastically misunderstood) XML seems the way to go. Martyn -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._