Hi, On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 6:36 PM, William Dunlap <wdun...@tibco.com> wrote:
> Do you get similar results rif you use 10 instead of NA > in your examples, with more spaces if you use 10000? No. Only that particular combination of NA values and strings with spaces gives the odd result. > I think this has to do with apply's call to as.matrix(X) > when X is a data.frame with mixed numeric and character > or factor columns. It calls format() on each numeric column > to convert its elements to strings with the same number > of characters in each string. apply() rarely gives you what > you want on such mixed data.frames. The most perplexing bit, though, is that apply() adds the extra spaces for _all_ columns, not just the ones with NA values. I assume that's to do with the internals of apply; it just wasn't something I expected. > Pasting the columns without apply is faster and will > give the correct results. I find it convenient to use > do.call here: > > do.call(`paste`, c(unname(test3),list(sep=","))) > [1] "1,a,a b,2" "1,a,a b,2" "1,a,a b,2" "1,a,a b,NA" "1,a,a b,2" > (unname(as.list(test3)) would be a bit more legal. The unname > would be required if one of the column names was 'sep' or > 'collapse'.) Yes, there are other possibilities. I'm not as adept with do.call() as I should be, and missed that one - thanks. And of course, this was part of a larger more complex problem, and not truly an end of itself. Thanks for the thoughts, Sarah -- Sarah Goslee http://www.functionaldiversity.org ______________________________________________ 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.
