[Rd] String to list and visa versa

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:

> On Tuesday 14 November 2006 12:28 pm, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>> This approach won't work in very many cases (but then nor will write.csv).
>>
>> The safest way I know is to use serialize() and unserialize().  Next to
>> that, deparse(control="all") and parse(text=) are quite good and give a
>> human-readable character representation.
>>
>> If fidelity is not the main issue, as.character and toString spring to
>> mind.  unlist is recursive, and is not going to come close to being
>> faithful for other than very simple lists. And what if ',' is a character
>> in one of the list elements?
>
> Yes, but then one can replace ',' with something rarely used like \007.
> I picked ',' because write.csv/read.csv worked before.

But it quotes strings ....

> You are right, for storage serialize/unserialize seem best, however for
> manipulation one would usually prefer a well-defined format.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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