[Rd] How to handle INT8 data

[Nicolas Paris]

Well I definitely cannot use them as numeric because join is the main
reason of those identifiers.

About int64 and bit64 packages, it's not a solution, because I am
releasing a dataset for external users. I cannot ask them to install a
package in order to exploit them.

I have to be very carefull when releasing the data. If a user just use
read.csv functions, they by default cast the identifiers as numeric.

$ more res.csv
"col1";"col2"
"-1311071933951566764";"toto"
"-1311071933951566764";"tata"


> read.table("res.csv",sep=";",header=T)
           col1 col2
1 -1.311072e+18 toto
2 -1.311072e+18 tata

>sapply(read.table("res.csv",sep=";",header=T),class)
     col1      col2
"numeric"  "factor"

> read.table("res.csv",sep=";",header=T,colClasses="character")
col1 col2
1 -1311071933951566764 toto
2 -1311071933951566764 tata

Am I comdemned to provide a R script with the data in order to exploit the dataset ?

Le 20 janv. 2017 à 18h29, Murray Stokely écrivait :
> 2^53 == 2^53+1
> TRUE
> 
> Which makes joining or grouping data sets with 64 bit identifiers problematic.
> 
> Murray (mobile)
> 
> On Jan 20, 2017 9:15 AM, "Nicolas Paris" <nicolas.paris at aphp.fr> wrote:
> 
>     Le 20 janv. 2017 à 18h09, Murray Stokely écrivait :
>     > The lack of 64 bit integer support causes lots of problems when dealing
>     with
>     > certain types of data where the loss of precision from coercing to 53
>     bits with
>     > double is unacceptable.
> 
>     Hello Murray,
>     Do you mean, by eg. -1311071933951566764 loses in precision during
>     as.numeric(-1311071933951566764) process ?
>     Thanks,
>     >
>     > Two packages were developed to deal with this:  int64 and bit64.
>     >
>     > You may need to find archival versions of these packages if they've
>     fallen off
>     > cran.
>     >
>     > Murray (mobile phone)
>     >
>     > On Jan 20, 2017 7:20 AM, "Gabriel Becker" <gmbecker at ucdavis.edu> wrote:
>     >
>     >     I am not on R-core, so cannot speak to future plans to internally
>     support
>     >     int8 (though my impression is that there aren't any, at least none
>     that are
>     >     close to fruition).
>     >
>     >     The standard way of dealing with whole numbers too big to fit in an
>     integer
>     >     is to put them in a numeric (double down in C land). this can
>     represent
>     >     integers up to 2^53 without loss of precision see (
>     >     http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1848700/biggest-
>     >     integer-that-can-be-stored-in-a-double).
>     >     This is how long vector indices are (currently) implemented in R. If
>     it's
>     >     good enough for indices it's probably good enough for whatever you
>     need
>     >     them for.
>     >
>     >     Hope that helps.
>     >
>     >     ~G
>     >
>     >
>     >     On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 6:33 AM, Nicolas Paris <nicolas.paris at aphp.fr
>     >
>     >     wrote:
>     >
>     >     > Hello r users,
>     >     >
>     >     > I have to deal with int8 data with R. AFAIK  R does only handle
>     int4
>     >     > with `as.integer` function [1]. I wonder:
>     >     > 1. what is the better approach to handle int8 ? `as.character` ?
>     >     > `as.numeric` ?
>     >     > 2. is there any plan to handle int8 in the future ? As you might
>     know,
>     >     > int4 is to small to deal with earth population right now.
>     >     >
>     >     > Thanks for you ideas,
>     >     >
>     >     > int8 eg:
>     >     >
>     >     >      human_id
>     >     > ----------------------
>     >     >  -1311071933951566764
>     >     >  -4708675461424073238
>     >     >  -6865005668390999818
>     >     >   5578000650960353108
>     >     >  -3219674686933841021
>     >     >  -6469229889308771589
>     >     >   -606871692563545028
>     >     >  -8199987422425699249
>     >     >   -463287495999648233
>     >     >   7675955260644241951
>     >     >
>     >     > reference:
>     >     > 1. https://www.r-bloggers.com/r-in-a-64-bit-world/
>     >     >
>     >     > --
>     >     > Nicolas PARIS
>     >     >
>     >     > ______________________________________________
>     >     > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>     >     > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>     >     >
>     >
>     >
>     >
>     >     --
>     >     Gabriel Becker, PhD
>     >     Associate Scientist (Bioinformatics)
>     >     Genentech Research
>     >
>     >             [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>     >
>     >     ______________________________________________
>     >     R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>     >     https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>     >
>     >
> 
>     --
>     Nicolas PARIS
> 
> 

-- 
Nicolas PARIS