From vdergachev at rcgardis.com  Wed May 23 22:01:26 2007
From: vdergachev at rcgardis.com (Vladimir Dergachev)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 16:01:26 -0400
Subject: [Rd] is.finite confusion
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0705231825400.960@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
References: <200705231318.37662.vdergachev@rcgardis.com>
	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0705231825400.960@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <200705231601.26817.vdergachev@rcgardis.com>

On Wednesday 23 May 2007 1:29 pm, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> No, because it is carefully documented to do this, and people rely on it
> working as documented.  (Did you do the homework the posting guide asked
> for?)  What harm came out of learning that the values were not finite?

I read the manpage if that is what you are talking about. 

The particular thing I was attempting to do is to convert all entries that are 
not values to NULL before storing the result in the database. From my point 
of view string value was perfectly finite and my code worked with a 
data.frame I had because it happened to have factors in it.

Yes, I easily concede that since I know about it now I am not likely to make 
the same mistake again. Just was trying (politely) to be of help to other 
users.

                             best

                                 Vladimir Dergachev

>
> On Wed, 23 May 2007, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
> >    I have recently made a silly screwup by applying is.finite() to a
> >
> > character vector:
> >>  is.finite(c("a", "b"))
> >
> > [1] FALSE FALSE
> >
> > This does work with factors of course (as they are integer underneath)
> >
> > I wonder if a fix could be put in so that it either reports an error when
> > applied to a character vector - or, perhaps better, act as is.na()
>
> What way is that?  It acts in the same way, as I understand the help
> pages.
>
> >                      thank you
> >
> >                               Vladimir Dergachev
> > PS test on R 2.5.0, 2.3.1



[Rd] is.finite confusion
Vladimir Dergachev