Sorry about the odd terminology, but I suspect that my intent might be completely missed had I used "aggregate" or "classify" (each of which appears to have some rather special meanings in statistical analysis and modeling).
I have some data about software builds; one of the characteristics of
each is the name of the branch.
A colleague has generated some fairly interesting graphs from the data,
but he's treating each unique branch as if it were a separate factor.
Last I checked, I had 276 unique branches, but these could be
aggregated, classified, or "lumped" into about 8 - 10 categories; I
believe it would be useful and helpful for me to be able to do precisely
that.
A facility that could work for this purpose (that that we use in our
"continuous build" driver) is the Bourne shell "case" statement. Such a
construct might look like:
case branch in
trunk) factor="trunk"; continue;;
IB*) factor="IB"; continue;;
DEV*) factor="DEV"; continue;;
PVT*) factor="PVT"; continue;;
RELEASE*) factor="RELEASE"; continue;;
*) factor="UNK"; continue;;
esac
Which would assign one of 6 values to "factor" depending on the value of
"branch" -- using "UNK" as a default if nothing else matched.
Mind, the patterns there are "Shell Patterns" ("globs"), not regular
expressions.
I've looked at R functions match(), pmatch(), charmatch(), and switch();
while each looks as it it might be coercable to get the result I want,
it also looks to require iteration over the thousands of entries I have
-- as well as using the functions in question in a fairly "unnatural"
way.
I could also write my own function that iterates over the entries,
generating factors from the branch names -- but I can't help but think
that what I'm trying to do can't be so uncommon that someone hasn't
already written a function to do what I'm trying to do. And I'd really
rather avoid "re-inventing the wheel," here.
So: would someone please supply a clue?
Thanks!
Peace,
david
--
David H. Wolfskill r...@catwhisker.org
Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil.
See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
pgp8RPuQM7p5R.pgp
Description: PGP signature
______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
