[R] don't print object attributes

[Liviu Andronic]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Assign a class to the object, and write a print method for it.
>
> For example, this doesn't quite do what you want, but it's a start:
>
> print.noattributes <- function(x, ...) {
>    attributes(x) <- NULL
>    print(x)
> }
>
> class(x) <- "noattributes"
> x
>
> It loses some attributes that you probably want to keep (e.g. the names),
> but otherwise works on your example.
>
I've already tried this solution but that's exactly the trouble with
this approach. Do this on a data.frame and loses important
information.

I came up with a modified version of the above:
print_noattr <- function(x, keep.some=T, ...){
    if(keep.some) xa <- attributes(x)[c('names', 'row.names', 'class')]
    attributes(x) <- NULL
    if(keep.some) attributes(x) <- xa
    print(x)
}

> x <- dlply(iris, .(Species), function(x) describe(x[, 'Sepal.Length']))
> print_noattr(x)
$setosa
x[, "Sepal.Length"]
      n missing  unique    Mean     .05     .10     .25     .50     .75
     50       0      15   5.006    4.40    4.59    4.80    5.00    5.20
    .90     .95
   5.41    5.61

          4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9  5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.7 5.8
Frequency   1   3   1   4   2   5   4  8   8   3   1   5   2   2   1
%           2   6   2   8   4  10   8 16  16   6   2  10   4   4   2

$versicolor
x[, "Sepal.Length"]
      n missing  unique    Mean     .05     .10     .25     .50     .75
     50       0      21   5.936   5.045   5.380   5.600   5.900   6.300
    .90     .95
  6.700   6.755

lowest : 4.9 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.4, highest: 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 7.0

$virginica
x[, "Sepal.Length"]
      n missing  unique    Mean     .05     .10     .25     .50     .75
     50       0      21   6.588   5.745   5.800   6.225   6.500   6.900
    .90     .95
  7.610   7.700

lowest : 4.9 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9, highest: 7.3 7.4 7.6 7.7 7.9


However this still feels like a hack, and the function should be
modified if the object in question contains some other crucial
attributes.



On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 7:44 PM, Peter Ehlers <ehlers at ucalgary.ca> wrote:
> It seems that class "listof" also works:
>
>   class(x) <- "listof"
>   x
>
This works great. Thanks.

Liviu