[Rd] stringsAsFactors = FALSE

[hadley wickham]

Hi all,

I love the option to not automatically convert strings into factors,
but there are three places that the current option doesn't work where
I think it should:

options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

str(expand.grid(letters))
str(type.convert(letters))

df <- read.fwf(textConnection(paste(letters,collapse="\n")), 1)
str(df)

I think type.convert and read.fwf can be fixed by giving them a
stringsAsFactors argument and then using asis = !stringsAsFactors
(like read.table).  The key lines in expand.grid would seem to be

            if (!is.factor(x) && is.character(x))
                x <- factor(x, levels = unique(x))

but I'm not sure why they are being converted to factors in the first place.

Regards,

Hadley

-- 
http://had.co.nz/