3 messages · Brian Ripley, Vladimir Dergachev
I have recently made a silly screwup by applying is.finite() to a character vector:
is.finite(c("a", "b"))
[1] FALSE FALSE
This does work with factors of course (as they are integer underneath)
I wonder if a fix could be put in so that it either reports an error when
applied to a character vector - or, perhaps better, act as is.na()
thank you
Vladimir Dergachev
PS test on R 2.5.0, 2.3.1
No, because it is carefully documented to do this, and people rely on it working as documented. (Did you do the homework the posting guide asked for?) What harm came out of learning that the values were not finite?
I have recently made a silly screwup by applying is.finite() to a character vector:
is.finite(c("a", "b"))
[1] FALSE FALSE This does work with factors of course (as they are integer underneath) I wonder if a fix could be put in so that it either reports an error when applied to a character vector - or, perhaps better, act as is.na()
What way is that? It acts in the same way, as I understand the help pages.
thank you
Vladimir Dergachev
PS test on R 2.5.0, 2.3.1
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
No, because it is carefully documented to do this, and people rely on it working as documented. (Did you do the homework the posting guide asked for?) What harm came out of learning that the values were not finite?
I read the manpage if that is what you are talking about.
The particular thing I was attempting to do is to convert all entries that are
not values to NULL before storing the result in the database. From my point
of view string value was perfectly finite and my code worked with a
data.frame I had because it happened to have factors in it.
Yes, I easily concede that since I know about it now I am not likely to make
the same mistake again. Just was trying (politely) to be of help to other
users.
best
Vladimir Dergachev
On Wed, 23 May 2007, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
I have recently made a silly screwup by applying is.finite() to a character vector:
is.finite(c("a", "b"))
[1] FALSE FALSE This does work with factors of course (as they are integer underneath) I wonder if a fix could be put in so that it either reports an error when applied to a character vector - or, perhaps better, act as is.na()
What way is that? It acts in the same way, as I understand the help pages.
thank you
Vladimir Dergachev
PS test on R 2.5.0, 2.3.1