On 19/05/2010 12:14 PM, Hilmar Berger wrote:
Hi all,
This occurred in R-2.11.0 (WinXP).
The R-help page of .[ says that:
"Character indices can in some circumstances be partially matched (see
pmatch) to the names or dimnames of the object being subsetted (but
never
for subassignment). Unlike S (Becker et al p. 358)), R has never used
partial matching when extracting by [, and as from R 2.7.0 partial
matching
is not by default used by [[ (see argument exact)."
My understanding is therefore that .[ should never try partial matching.
See near the top of the page: "The descriptions here apply only to
the default methods." Since indexing is generic, an extraction method
can do whatever it wants, and you need to read the particular page to
find the behaviour. The page for Extract.data.frame says:
"Both |[| and |[[| extraction methods partially match row names. By
default neither partially match column names, but |[[| will unless
|exact=TRUE|. If you want to do exact matching on row names use |match
<http://127.0.0.1:28754/library/base/help/match>| as in the examples."
Duncan Murdoch