[Rd] [RFC] readtable enhancement

[Michael Lawrence]

This has some nice properties:

1) It self-documents the input expectations in a similar manner to
colClasses.
2) The implementation could eventually "push down" the coercion, e.g.,
calling it on each chunk of an iterative read operation.

The implementation needs work though, and I'm not convinced that coercion
failures should fallback gracefully to the default.

Feature requests fall under a "bug" in bugzilla terminology, so please
submit this there. I think I've made you an account.

Thanks,
Michael

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 1:19 PM Kurt Van Dijck <
dev.kurt using vandijck-laurijssen.be> wrote:

> Thank you for your answers.
> I rather do not file a new bug, since what I coded isn't really a bug.
>
> The problem I (my colleagues) have today is very stupid:
> We read .csv files with a lot of columns, of which most contain
> date-time stamps, coded in DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM.
> This is not exotic, but the base library's readtable (and derivatives)
> only accept date-times in a limited number of possible formats (which I
> understand very well).
>
> We could specify a format in a rather complicated format, for each
> column individually, but this syntax is rather difficult to maintain.
>
> My solution to this specific problem became trivial, yet generic
> extension to read.table.
> Rather than relying on the built-in type detection, I added a parameter
> to a function that will be called for each to-be-type-probed column so I
> can overrule the built-in limited default.
> If nothing returns from the function, the built-in default is still
> used.
>
> This way, I could construct a type-probing function that is
> straight-forward, not hard to code, and makes reading my .csv files
> acceptible in terms of code (read.table parameters).
>
> I'm sure I'm not the only one dealing with such needs, escpecially
> date-time formats exist in enormous amounts, but I want to stress here
> that my approach is agnostic to my specific problem.
>
> For those asking to 'show me the code', I redirect to my 2nd patch,
> where the tests have been extended with my specific problem.
>
> What are your opinions about this?
>
> Kind regards,
> Kurt
>
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