On Fri, 16 Jun 2017, Dario Strbenac wrote:
Good day,
It's not described anywhere in the help page, but tapply and by
functions will, by default, convert factors into numeric values. Perhaps
this needs to be documented or the behaviour changed.
It *is* described in the help page.
This returns a list of objects and each object class has "factor"
tapply(rep(1:2,2), rep(1:2,2),
function(x) factor(LETTERS[x], levels = LETTERS))
and this
tapply(1:3, 1:3, function(x) factor(LETTERS[x], levels = LETTERS))
1 2 3
1 2 3
returns a vector object with no class.
The documentation states "... tapply returns a multi-way array
containing the values ..." but doesn't mention anything about converting
factors into integers. I'd expect the values to be of the same type.
and also states
"If FUN returns a single atomic value for each such cell ... and when
simplify is TRUE ... if the return value has a class (e.g., an object of
class "Date") the class is discarded."
which is what just happened in your example.
Maybe you want:
unlist(tapply(1:3, 1:3, function(x) factor(LETTERS[x],
levels = LETTERS),simplify=FALSE))
Trying to preserve class worked here in a way you might have
hoped/expected, but might lead to difficulties in other uses.
HTH,
Chuck
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