2 messages · Sam Steingold, Simon Blomberg
summary() in functions seems to print nothing. str() does print something. why?
Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on CentOS release 5.3 (Final) http://mideasttruth.com http://truepeace.org http://iris.org.il http://pmw.org.il http://jihadwatch.org http://ffii.org A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
summary() in functions seems to print nothing. str() does print something. why?
summary() returns the summary information as its value. If you want to see this value from inside a function, use print(summary()). The reason you see the summary information at the top level is because R implicitly assumes that you want to print() the summary() output. This is the same for any object. Typing obj at the prompt is really the same as doing print(obj). In contrast, str() does not return a value, and you see the output printed because it is a side-effect of calling the function. (This behaviour irks me as it is not good functional programming style, although ?str says that it does not return a value for "efficiency reasons"). Cheers, Simon.
Simon Blomberg, BSc (Hons), PhD, MAppStat, AStat Lecturer and Consultant Statistician School of Biological Sciences The University of Queensland St. Lucia Queensland 4072 Australia T: +61 7 3365 2506 email: S.Blomberg1_at_uq.edu.au http://www.uq.edu.au/~uqsblomb/ Policies: 1. I will NOT analyse your data for you. 2. Your deadline is your problem Statistics is the grammar of science - Karl Pearson.