[R] apply, lapply and data.frame in R 2.5

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, jiho wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> A recent (in 2.5 I suspect) change in R is giving me trouble. I want
> to apply a function (tolower) to all the columns of a data.frame and
> get a data.frame in return.
> Currently, on a data.frame, both apply (for arrays) and lapply (for
> lists) work, but each returns its native class (resp. matrix and list):
>
> apply(mydat,2,tolower) 	# gives a matrix
> lapply(mydat,tolower)	# gives a list
> and
> sapply(mydat,tolower)	# gives a matrix

which is exactly what R 2.0.0 did, so no recent(ish) change at all.

> If I remember well, apply did not used to work on data.frames and
> lapply returned a data.frame when it was provided with one, with the
> same properties (columns classes etc). At least this is what my code
> written with R 2.4.* suggests.

apply has coerced data frames for many years and lapply always returned a 
list.  The solution has always been

mydat[] <- lapply(mydat,tolower)


> The solution would be:
> as.data.frame(apply(mydat,2,tolower))
> or
> as.data.frame(lapply(mydat,tolower))
>
> But this does not keep columns attributes (all columns are
> reinterpreted, for example strings are converted to factors etc). For
> my particular use stringsAsFactors=FALSE does what I need, but I am
> wondering wether there is a more general solution to apply a function
> on all elements of a data.frame and get a similar data.frame in
> return. Indeed data.frames are probably the most common object in R
> and applying a function to each of its columns/variables appears to
> me as something one would want to do quite often.
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> JiHO
> ---
> http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
>
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>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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