How do you organize the objects you produced?
"Rikkoe at softhome.net" wrote:
Hello! It would be nice to hear how you organize the R-objects you produced. I found almost nothing about that neither in the R-manuals nor in two books about S. For example I am trying to find out, how to load the functions that I have written and that are now saved in a .txt-file in a Windows directory. Is copying and pasting it to the RGui console really the only feasible way to do that? Constructing packages, similar to the ones included in the basic R system, is probably too complicated for a beginner like me, isn?t it?
Well, I wouldn't suggest to start learning R by creating your own packages. But after some experiences it's a nice thing. You are looking for source() It's mentioned in section 1.10 of "An Introduction to R" (this manual is really worth reading it completely; hint, hint!).
I wonder why manuals and books just explain how to write functions, but not how to keep and to reload them. I have got a similar problem with my data. I understood (mistakenly?) that one can attach a Windows directory to the search path, so that every file inside this directory is known by R, without further need to specify the path.
Indeed, mistakenly.
From ?attach:
"Usage: attach(what, pos = 2, name = deparse(substitute(what))) Arguments: what, ``database''. This may currently be a data.frame or list or a R data file created with save." You can set your working directory (see below).
So I tried:
attach("C:\\Temp",2)
Error in load(file, envir) : unable to open file
search()
[1] ".GlobalEnv" "file:C:\\Temp" "package:ctest" "Autoloads" [5] "package:base" Temp is a directory and includes a file named test.dat. I went on:
Well, as cited above: it's a directory, but neither a data.frame nor a list nor a R data file.
file <- read.table("test.dat", header = TRUE, fill = TRUE)
Error in file(file, "r") : cannot open file `test.dat' This last command only works when I use the RGui-menu to change my working directory to Temp. I feel I am using R as if cutting hair with a spoon. Do you know a nicer way to use it?
Instead of using the GUI, you can set your working directory with
setwd("c:/temp")
Additionally, read.table() [and any other function] also works for whole
paths, e.g.: "c:/temp/test.dat".
Uwe Ligges
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