[Bioc-devel] Bug in frmaTools

[Ryan C. Thompson]

Hello,

I just encountered a bug in frmaTools that makes it impossible to use on 
certain array platforms. The following lines in makeVectorsAffyBatch 
fail on an AffyBatch object on the hthgu133pluspm platform:

     pms <- pm(object)
     pns <- probeNames(object)
     pmi <- unlist(pmindex(object))
     if (!identical(as.character(pmi), rownames(pms)))
         stop("Mismatch between pmindex and rownames of pms")

I isolated the problem to five probes:

 > i <- which(as.character(pmi) != rownames(pms))
 > pmi[i]
  1564498_PM_at9 205398_PM_s_at8 217695_PM_x_at7 223446_PM_s_at7 
237802_PM_at3
           3e+05           5e+05           2e+05 1e+05           4e+05
 > rownames(pms)[i]
[1] "300000" "500000" "200000" "100000" "400000"
 > as.character(pmi)[i]
[1] "3e+05" "5e+05" "2e+05" "1e+05" "4e+05"

As you can see, the problem is that as.character will happily use 
scientific notation when it feels like it, which then fails a test for 
string equality. I believe the solution is to replace that test with:

all(sprintf("%i", pmi) == rownames(pms))

-Ryan