[Rd] Zero-length 'by' in 'aggregate.data.frame'

[Suharto Anggono Suharto Anggono]

Use of tapply() with a 0-length INDEX list is made deprecated in R 2.15.2. How about the similar case for 'aggregate.data.frame', i.e. 0-length 'by' list? Is it going to be supported or not?


In R 2.15.2, it doesn't work if 'by' does not have names, but works if 'by' has names. If 0-length 'by' does not have names, the code

names(by) <- paste("Group", seq_along(by), sep = ".")

fails to give names, because the result of

paste("Group", seq_along(by), sep = ".")

is "Group.", which has length 1 instead of 0.


> aggregate(data.frame(x=1:10), list(), length)
Error in aggregate.data.frame(data.frame(x = 1:10), list(), length) :
  'names' attribute [1] must be the same length as the vector [0]
> aggregate(data.frame(x=1:10),
+ structure(list(), names=character(0)), length)
   x
1 10
> sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26)
Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base