[R] extracting rows of a dataframe

[Robin Hankin]

Hi

look at the following session, in which I have a dataframe,
and I want to extract the second row, without the first column.

Everything works as expected until the last line, where I set
the names of x to NULL, and get a non-desired object (I
want c(4,3).).


Three questions:

(1)  why is as.vector(a[2,-1]) not a vector?

(2) How come setting names to NULL gives me bad weirdness?

(3) Can I structure my dataframe in a better way, so that
this problem does not occur?




 > a <- data.frame(male=c(T,T,F),mass=c(1,4,3),height=c(4,3,2))
 > a
    male mass height
1  TRUE    1      4
2  TRUE    4      3
3 FALSE    3      2
 > x <- as.vector(a[2,-1])
 > x
   mass height
2    4      3
 > names(x) <- NULL
 > x
   structure("4", class = "AsIs") structure("3", class = "AsIs")
2                              4                              3
 >

--
Robin Hankin
Uncertainty Analyst
National Oceanography Centre, Southampton
European Way, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK
  tel  023-8059-7743