[Rd] length-0 list as dimnames

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jun 5, 2012, at 7:37 PM, Benilton Carvalho wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm working on a package and observed a behaviour that was suggested
> to be incompatible with the documentation.
> 
> The code below:
> 
> x <- matrix(1:4, 2)
> dimnames(x) <- list()
> 
> works just fine. But checking the documentation for dimnames(), it
> states that if value is a list "its components are either 'NULL' or a
> character vector with positive length of the appropriate dimension of
> x".
> 
> Should dimnames() return an error on the example above?
> 

No, from the docs:

     The replacement method for arrays/matrices coerces vector and
     factor elements of ‘value’ to character, but does not dispatch
     methods for ‘as.character’.  It coerces zero-length elements to
     ‘NULL’, and a zero-length list to ‘NULL’. 

you are using a 0-length list, so it is coerced to NULL.

Cheers,
Simon



> Thank you very much for your attention and time,
> 
> benilton
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> 
>