From Benjamin.Hofner at imbe.med.uni-erlangen.de  Tue Nov 18 14:30:36 2008
From: Benjamin.Hofner at imbe.med.uni-erlangen.de (Benjamin Hofner)
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:30:36 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Wishlist - better object.size() function
Message-ID: <4922C37C.7080301@imbe.med.uni-erlangen.de>

Some time ago I came across the function object.size() to estimate the 
size of an R object. I don't know if the behavior of the function is 
intended to be quite "user unfriendly" as it is right now or if just 
nobody was thinking/caring about it.

I have two suggestions to improve it:
- Why is it named object.size() and not just size()? The latter would be 
far more intuitive and shorter and as far as I know there is no other 
function size (in the base distribution).
- Why is the function returning the size in bytes? This is (in most 
cases) overly accurate and for humans hard to read. I would suggest to 
have it printed in mb per default and additionally add a switch to 
choose the appropriate unit.

This is a first proposal:

size <- function(x, type=c("mb","byte","kb","gb"), digits=3){
     type <- match.arg(type)
     RET <- switch(type,
                   byte = object.size(x),
                   kb = object.size(x)/1024,
                   mb = object.size(x)/(1024^2),
                   gb = object.size(x)/(1024^3))
     cat(round(RET,digits), type, "\n")
     invisible(RET)
}

I think this would improve the usability of the function a lot.

Thanks,
   Benjamin
-- 
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Dipl.-Stat. Benjamin Hofner

Institut f?r Medizininformatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie
Friedrich-Alexander-Universit?t Erlangen-N?rnberg
Waldstr. 6 - 91054 Erlangen - Germany

Tel: +49-9131-85-22707
Fax: +49-9131-85-25740

http://www.imbe.med.uni-erlangen.de/~hofnerb/
http://www.benjaminhofner.de

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[Rd] Wishlist - better object.size() function
Benjamin Hofner