Hi Uwe, 2012/3/17 Uwe Ligges <lig...@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>: > > > On 15.03.2012 22:48, Matthew Dowle wrote: >> >> >> Anyone? >> >>> Is it intended that the first suffix can no longer be blank? Seems to be >>> caused by a bug fix to merge in R 2.15.0. > > > > Right, the user is now protected against confusing himself by using names > that were not unique before the merge.
... now I'm confused :-) If the user explicitly asks for a NULL/0/empty/whatever suffix, they're not really going to be confusing themselves, right? I actually feel like I do this often, where "this" is explicitly asking to not add a suffix to one group of columns ... I do confuse myself every and now and again, but not in this context, yet. I can see that *this* confusing case is now handled w/ this change (which wasn't before): ## I'm using R-devel compiled back in November, 2011 (r57571) R> d1 <- data.frame(a=letters[1:10], b=rnorm(10), b.x=tail(letters, 10)) R> d2 <- data.frame(a=letters[1:10], b=101:110) R> merge(d1, d2, by='a', suffixes=c('.x', '.y')) a b.x b.x b.y 1 a -1.52250626 q 101 2 b -0.99865341 r 102 ... ## Let's call this "exhibit A" But if I do this: R> merge(d1, d2, by='a', suffixes=c("", ".y")) I totally expect: a b b.x b.y 1 a -1.52250626 q 101 2 b -0.99865341 r 102 ## Let's call this "exhibit B" ... and not (using R-2.15.0 beta) (exhibit B): Error in merge.data.frame(d1, d2, by = "a", suffixes = c("", ".y")) : there is already a column named 'b' I can take a crack at a patch to keep the "rescue user from surprises" example outlined in "exhibit A," but also letting user accomplish "exhibit B" if there is a consensus of agreement on this particular world view. -steve -- Steve Lianoglou Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center | Weill Medical College of Cornell University Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel