Hi Dennis,
On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Fisher Dennis <fis...@plessthan.com> wrote:
> R 3.1.0
> OS X
>
> Colleagues,
>
> I recently updated to 3.1.0 and I have encountered
> Warning messages: ... Name partially matched in data frame
> when I do something like:
> DATAFRAME$colname
> where colname is actually something longer than that (but unambiguous).
>
> I have much appreciated the partial matching capabilities because it fits
> with my workflow. I often receive updated data months after the initial code
> is written. In order to keep track of what I did in the past, I provide
> lengthy (unambiguous) names for columns, then abbreviate the names as I call
> them. This behavior has been termed “lazy” in various correspondence on this
> mailing list but it works for me and probably works for others.
Why not store that information elsewhere? e.g. in an attribute?
> I realize that the new message is only a warning but it is a minor nuisance.
> Would it be possible to add an
> option(partialMatch=TRUE) ## default is FALSE
> or something similar to suppress that behavior? That should keep both camps
> happy.
There is currently no option to control that behavior and (although I
do understand your use case) I personally hope one is not implemented.
The reason is that you might put that option in your .Rprofile and
when you share your code with me I get errors that columns aren't
found.
You can of course redefine the `$`:
> dataf <- data.frame(longColumn = 5)
> dataf$long
[1] 5
Warning message:
In `$.data.frame`(dataf, long) : Name partially matched in data frame
>
> `$.data.frame` <-
+ function (x, name)
+ {
+ a <- x[[name]]
+ if (!is.null(a))
+ return(a)
+ a <- x[[name, exact = FALSE]]
+ return(a)
+ }
>
> dataf$long
[1] 5
>
I hope you don't do that though.
Another option is to use the more verbose dataf[["long", exact = FALSE]].
Scott
--
Scott Kostyshak
Economics PhD Candidate
Princeton University
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