[Rd] Large discrepancies in the same object being saved to .RData

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 10/07/2010 2:33 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 7:12 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On 06/07/2010 9:04 PM, Julian.Taylor at csiro.au wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi developers,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> After some investigation I have found there can be large discrepancies in
>>> the same object being saved as an external "xx.RData" file. The immediate
>>> repercussion of this is the possible increased size of your .RData workspace
>>> for no apparent reason.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> I haven't worked through your example, but in general the way that local
>> objects get captured is when part of the return value includes an
>> environment.
>>     
>
> Hi, can I ask a follow up question?
>
> Is there a tool to browse *.Rdata files without loading them into R?
>   

I don't know of one.  You can load the whole file into an empty 
environment, but then you lose information about "where did it come from"?

Duncan Murdoch
> In HDF5 (a data storage format we use sometimes), there is a CLI
> program "h5dump" that will spit out line-by-line all the contents of a
> storage entity.  It will literally track through all the metadata, all
> the vectors of scores, etc.  I've found that handy to "see what's
> really  in there" in cases like the one that OP asked about.
> Sometimes, we find that there are things that are "in there" by
> mistake, as Duncan describes, and then we can try to figure why they
> are in there.
>
> pj
>
>
>