Skip to content
Prev 12232 / 398502 Next

memory blues

On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Laurent Gautier wrote:

            
data.frame() ideally makes up names from the tags of the arguments, eg
a          b
1 1 -2.0499827
2 2 -0.4364342
3 3  0.5880059
4 4 -0.7636817
5 5 -1.3021187

If the arguments don't have tags it converts the expressions into names,
so in this example data.frame tried to convert 1:5, rnorm(5) and
rep(1,5) into valid names.
X1.5   rnorm.5. rep.1..5.
1    1 -0.5282023         1
2    2  0.6964649         1
3    3  1.1548943         1
4    4  1.3833800         1
5    5 -0.1553645         1


This approach isn't sufficient when one of the arguments to data.frame has
multiple columns. Ideally the column names of the matrix are used but if
one of the arguments is a matrix that itself has no column names then
data.frame falls back on the unimaginative "X1","X2"..

The moral of the story is that you can make up better names than
data.frame can.

	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Asst. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help 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-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._