[R] Error when naming rows of dataset

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 10/25/2006 7:44 AM, yongchuan wrote:
> I'm pretty new with R, so the only error message I see is
> the below that I pasted. 

What caught you is that R truncates the text when it prints an error. 
So it only listed the first 3 row names, which are unique, and didn't 
point out that the real problem was with the last one.

This is very common in R error messages:  the errors are usually less 
specific than they could be.  For instance, the code that detects the 
duplicate can easily determine which rows are duplicates, and could tell 
you that, but it doesn't.

Unfortunately, because this is so common, it would really require a lot 
of work to fix.  It would also dump a lot of work on the translation 
teams, because the new error messages would all need to be translated. 
Doing it would introduce new errors, and since they'd only show up in 
error conditions, they'd likely be missed.  So it's not even the kind of 
project that one person could take on, it would need the cooperation of 
several.

Sorry for going so far afield from your specific problem, but I think 
it's useful for new R users to know R's limitations, and some of the 
reasons for them.

Duncan Murdoch




I'm attaching the first few rows
> of the file for reference. The layout looks screwy when I
> attach it here but 'Start' to 'closingCoupon' is the first
> row in the .txt file. Thx!
> 
> 	Start	Stop	PrepayDate	modBalance	closingCoupon
> 1.1	6	7	0	811.2769	8.35
> 1.2	7	8	0	811.2769	8.35
> 1.3	8	9	1	811.2769	8.35
> 2.1	4	5	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 2.2	5	6	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 2.3	6	7	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 2.4	7	8	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 2.5	8	9	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 2.6	9	10	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 2.7	10	11	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 2.8	11	12	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 2.9	12	13	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 2.1	13	14	0	2226.0825	8.7
> 
>> 
>> From: Michael Dewey <info at aghmed.fsnet.co.uk>
>> Date: Wed 25/10/2006 6:38 PM SGT
>> To: yongchuan <panyc at pacific.net.sg>, <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
>> Subject: Re: [R] Error when naming rows of dataset
>> 
>> At 17:30 24/10/2006, yongchuan wrote:
>> >I get the following error when I try reading in a table.
>> >How are 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 duplicate row names? Thx.
>> 
>> R gives you brief details of where it was when it fell over.
>> Have you checked in latestWithNumber.txt' to see whether R is right?
>> 
>> 
>> > > table <- read.table('latestWithNumber.txt', header=T)
>> >Error in "row.names<-.data.frame"(`*tmp*`, value = c("1.1", "1.2", "1.3",  :
>> >         duplicate 'row.names' are not allowed
>> >
>> >Yongchuan
>> 
>> Michael Dewey
>> http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk
>> 
>>
> 
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