nchar on data.frames

Admittedly "protected by `I'" may not immediately conjure up the
particular construction shown below (although there is an example in the
help for data.frame() as well).  It doesn't mean that the text itself has
to begin with I, it means (as shown below) that the variable has to be
specified as I(x) rather than x itself.  This could be clumsy if for
example you wanted to convert a many-columned matrix to a data frame; I
guess you could do it with a loop (I just tried to figure out how to do it
with lapply() and a function levels(x)[x] which turns a factor back into a
text string, but it didn't work ...)

   Ben

Ben mentions using
%data.frame(text=I(temp$text),numbers=temp$numbers))

to read in text and numeric data in data.frame. I have read the help pages
about this, but not understood what was meant by protecting text data with
I. Does this mean that any text entry beginning with "I" will be read as
character string data variable rather than a factor?

Many thanks!

d

S. David White
sdavidwhite at bigfoot.com
Columbus, Ohio

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