[R] Selecting the "non-attribute" part of an object

[William Dunlap]

all.equal() will give some details on the differences between your objects.
If you don't care that some attribute will differ, either ignore all.equal's
output concerning it or remove it before giving the object to all.equal.
E.g., if you don't care about dimnames but do care about dimensions do
   canonicalize <- function(x) structure(x, dimnames=NULL)
   all.equal(canonicalize(tm), canonicalize(tmm)) 

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf
> Of Jonathan Dushoff
> Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2012 11:53 AM
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] Selecting the "non-attribute" part of an object
> 
> I have two matrices, generated by R functions that I don't understand.
>  I want to confirm that they're the same, but I know that they have
> different attributes.
> 
> If I want to compare the dimnames, I can say
> 
> > identical(attr(tm, "dimnames"), attr(tmm, "dimnames"))
> [1] FALSE
> 
> or even:
> 
> > identical(dimnames(tm), dimnames(tmm))
> [1] FALSE
> 
> But I can't find any good way to compare the "main" part of objects.
> 
> What I'm doing now is:
> 
> > tm_new <- tm
> > tmm_new <- tmm
> 
> > attributes(tm_new) <- attributes(tmm_new) <- NULL
> 
> > identical(tm_new, tmm_new)
> [1] TRUE
> 
> But that seems very inaesthetic, besides requiring that I create two
> pointless objects.
> 
> I have read ?attributes, ?attr and some web introductions to how R
> objects work, but have not found an answer.
> 
> Thanks for any help.
> 
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