[Rd] row names and identical

[miguel manese]

I was bit by this before. row.names are supposed to be characters, and
they are until around 2.3 iirc. Then at 2.4, they started storing it
as integers presumably to save space (and probably because ints are
more low-maintenance data types than strings). So to the user (e.g.
through row.names() ) they are still characters, but internally they
are not. I don't know what c(NA, 4L) stands for though (I see that it
has 4 elems...), or why the other is c(NA, -4L). However, in my code I
access them as a vector of integers,

rownames = getAttrib(df, R_RowNamesSymbol);
if (IS_INTEGER(rownames)) {
    for (int i = 0; i < LENGTH(rownames); i++) foo(INTEGER(rownames)[i] ...);
}

Cheers,
M. Manese

On 7/15/07, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
> Below x1, x2 and x3 all have the same data and all have the same value
> for row.names(x); however, the internal values of their row.names differ.
> The internal value of row.names is c(NA, -4L) for x1, c(NA, 4L) for x2 and
> c("1", "2", "3", "4") for x3; nevertheless, identical regards x1 and x2 as
> identical while x3 is not identical to either of x1 or x2.
>
> Is this intended?
> Desirable?
> Why do we need different internal representations for row.names
> for x1 and x2?
>
>
> > x1 <- x2 <- x3 <- data.frame(x = 11:14)
> > row.names(x2) <- 1:4
> > row.names(x3) <- as.character(1:4)
> >
> > # they all have the same value for row.names()
> > row.names(x1)
> [1] "1" "2" "3" "4"
> > row.names(x2)
> [1] "1" "2" "3" "4"
> > row.names(x3)
> [1] "1" "2" "3" "4"
> >
> > # but internally they are all different
> > dput(x1)
> structure(list(x = 11:14), .Names = "x", row.names = c(NA, -4L
> ), class = "data.frame")
> > dput(x2)
> structure(list(x = 11:14), .Names = "x", row.names = c(NA, 4L
> ), class = "data.frame")
> > dput(x3)
> structure(list(x = 11:14), .Names = "x", row.names = c("1", "2",
> "3", "4"), class = "data.frame")
> >
> > # identical regards x1 and x2 as the same while x3 differs
> > identical(x1, x2)
> [1] TRUE
> > identical(x1, x3)
> [1] FALSE
> > identical(x2, x3)
> [1] FALSE
> >
> > R.version.string # XP
> [1] "R version 2.5.1 (2007-06-27)"
>
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