don't print object attributes

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Duncan Murdoch

Assign a class to the object, and write a print method for it.

For example, this doesn't quite do what you want, but it's a start:

print.noattributes <- function(x, ...) {
   attributes(x) <- NULL
   print(x)
}

class(x) <- "noattributes"
x

It loses some attributes that you probably want to keep (e.g. the names),
but otherwise works on your example.

I've already tried this solution but that's exactly the trouble with
this approach. Do this on a data.frame and loses important
information.

I came up with a modified version of the above:
print_noattr <- function(x, keep.some=T, ...){
    if(keep.some) xa <- attributes(x)[c('names', 'row.names', 'class')]
    attributes(x) <- NULL
    if(keep.some) attributes(x) <- xa
    print(x)
}

x <- dlply(iris, .(Species), function(x) describe(x[, 'Sepal.Length']))
print_noattr(x)

$setosa
x[, "Sepal.Length"]
      n missing  unique    Mean     .05     .10     .25     .50     .75
     50       0      15   5.006    4.40    4.59    4.80    5.00    5.20
    .90     .95
   5.41    5.61

          4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9  5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.7 5.8
Frequency   1   3   1   4   2   5   4  8   8   3   1   5   2   2   1
%           2   6   2   8   4  10   8 16  16   6   2  10   4   4   2

$versicolor
x[, "Sepal.Length"]
      n missing  unique    Mean     .05     .10     .25     .50     .75
     50       0      21   5.936   5.045   5.380   5.600   5.900   6.300
    .90     .95
  6.700   6.755

lowest : 4.9 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.4, highest: 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 7.0

$virginica
x[, "Sepal.Length"]
      n missing  unique    Mean     .05     .10     .25     .50     .75
     50       0      21   6.588   5.745   5.800   6.225   6.500   6.900
    .90     .95
  7.610   7.700

lowest : 4.9 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9, highest: 7.3 7.4 7.6 7.7 7.9


However this still feels like a hack, and the function should be
modified if the object in question contains some other crucial
attributes.

It seems that class "listof" also works:

  class(x) <- "listof"
  x

This works great. Thanks.

Liviu