[Rd] read.table and strip.white

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

Prof Brian D Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> On Wed, 31 May 2000, Uwe Ligges wrote:
> 
> > Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> > 
> > > > [...]
> > 
> > > I was rather surprised here, and this is not what the prototype does:
> > > 
> > >   .col1. .col2. .col3.
> > > 1      1      1      1
> > > 2      2      2      2
> > > 
> > > Should not strip.white be true for the header line?
> > 
> > If there are no compatibility problems, setting it to TRUE would be
> > useful ...
> > But compatibility is an important point, especially in read.table(.), I
> > think. Many R users have got their own functions using read.table(.), I
> > suppose. Maybe changing the defaults could break anything?
> 
> That's tantamount to saying we should not fix bugs because users might be
> relying on the undocumented and unintended behaviour!  Yes, changing this
> could change things: for a start the V&R MASS datasets would load correctly
> on R without R-specific editing.  Does anyone seriously intend to have
> heading spaces in their column names in a data frame? Especially as those
> are not S variable names, and as you see S-PLUS (but not R) does enforce
> that.  (read.table circumvents that by not using the class
> constructor, but S-PLUS has an explicit call to make.names lacking in R.)
> 
> I am inclined to make the change _and_ to check the column names.

I tend to agree, recently having had dealings with an SPSS-created
.cvs file with "Height SDS" and so on as variable names. However, it
would seem that the prototype *does* read the leading whitespace and
replaces it with a dot while fixing the names, no? I don't disagree
that we're probably better off without that effect, but if we're going
for compatibility.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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