Dear Jim and David, Thank you very much for your reply. I guess my question is whether it is legal to store vectors in the elements of a data.frame. These are useful for storing things like neighbors of a graph vertex, orthologs of a gene etc. I have been using data frames of this sort and they are very useful, so I am hoping this is a feature, rather than a bug. The weird code in my email to form a was just one quick way of making such an object for a toy example. These sort of data frames were doing fine for a number of analysis pipelines until I used a function on them that had code of the sort df[, j] <- sapply(df[, j], fun)
The interesting thing is that while a[,3] <- a[,3] changes the object and gives the warning a$c <- a$c works "correctly". leaving a to what it was and doesn't give a warning. If elements of a data frame are supposed to be able to store vectors, then shouldn't a[,3] <- a[,3] work? Best regards, yasir On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 9:48 PM, David Winsemius <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On May 3, 2016, at 4:13 PM, Yasir Suhail <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Dear R developers and users, > > > > Consider the object : > > > >> a <- data.frame(a=c(1,2), b=c(2,3), c=c("a,b","c,d"), stringsAsFactors > = F) > >> a$c <- strsplit(a$c, ",") > > You are the one who should "consider the object". Look at what > strsplit(a$c, ",") returns and then perhaps re-consider trying to assign it > to a single column. > > > > > Re-assignment works fine for columns 1 and 2, but fails for column 3. If > a > > is a valid object, the assignment should work. > > > >> a[,1] <- a[,1] > >> a[,2] <- a[,2] > >> a[,3] <- a[,3] > > Warning message: > > In `[<-.data.frame`(`*tmp*`, , 3, value = list(c("a", "b"), c("c", : > > provided 2 variables to replace 1 variables > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > And please reconsider also the format of your postings. > > > > > ______________________________________________ > > [email protected] mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > > 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. > > David Winsemius > Alameda, CA, USA > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.
