[R] Viewing a data object

[Stephen Tucker]

Hi Horace,

I have also thought that it may be useful but I don't know of any Object
Explorer available for R.

However, (you may alread know this but) 
(1) you can view your list of objects in R with objects(), 
(2) view objects in a spreadsheet-like table (if they are matrices or data
frames) with invisible(edit(objectName)) [which isn't easy on the fingers].
fix(objectName) is also a shorter option but it has the side effect of
possibly changing your object when you close the viewing data. For instance,
this can happen if you mistakenly type something into a cell; it can also
change your column classes when you don't - for example:

> options(stringsAsFactors=TRUE)
> x <- data.frame(letters[1:5],1:5)
> sapply(x,class)
letters.1.5.         X1.5 
    "factor"    "integer" 
> fix(x) # no user-changes made
> sapply(x,class)
letters.1.5.         X1.5 
    "factor"    "numeric" 

(3) I believe Deepayan Sarkar contributed the tab-completion capability at
the command line. So unless you have a lot of objects beginning with
'AuroraStoch...' you should be able to type a few letters and let the
auto-completion handle the rest.

Best regards,

ST


--- Horace Tso <Horace.Tso at pgn.com> wrote:

> Dear list,
> 
> First apologize that this is trivial and just betrays my slothfulness at
> the keyboard. I'm sick of having to type a long name just to get a glimpse
> of something. For example, if my data frame is named
> 'AuroraStochasticRunsJune1.df" and I want to see what the middle looks
> like, I have to type
> 
> AuroraStochasticRunsJune1.df[ 400:500, ]
> 
> And often I'm not even sure rows 400 to 500 are what I want to see.  I
> might have to type the same line many times.
> 
> Is there sort of a R-equivalence of the Object Explorer, like in Splus,
> where I could mouse-click an object in a list and a window pops up?  Short
> of that, is there any trick of saving a couple of keystrokes here and
> there?
> 
> Thanks for tolerating this kind of annoying questions.
> 
> H.
> 
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