From tplate at acm.org  Tue Dec  8 22:24:28 2009
From: tplate at acm.org (Tony Plate)
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:24:28 -0700
Subject: [Rd] extraction of sub-matrix by name
In-Reply-To: <7B217AE0-D867-472D-B985-1FD9212E5238@erasmusmc.nl>
References: <7B217AE0-D867-472D-B985-1FD9212E5238@erasmusmc.nl>
Message-ID: <4B1EC40C.6080403@acm.org>

This is documented behavior. From ?"[.data.frame":

Both ?[? and ?[[? extraction methods partially match row
names. By default neither partially match column names, but
?[[? will unless ?exact=TRUE?. If you want to do exact
matching on row names use ?match? as in the examples.

In the history of S, S-PLUS and R partial matching for subscripts and 
indices has been used in many places, but over time it has been removed 
from some. Some methods for "[[" have an "exact" argument that allows 
specification of whether you want exact or prefix matches. However, as 
the docs indicate, this doesn't apply to "[" for rownames in data 
frames. At this point, the behavior is unlikely to change -- it risks 
breaking too much old code (that's just my opinion based on observation 
of the evolution of R -- I have no control over that evolution). Follow 
the suggestion in the help for [.data.frame to get exact matching.

-- Tony Plate

Yurii Aulchenko wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> sorry to bother you with potentially known issue --
>
> we have noticed that if we select data frame rows by rownames, we get 
> some results back if the match can be done unambiguously, though the 
> match is not perfect (see example), e.g. x{"2",] will return a row if 
> there is a unique row with name starting with "2" (but may be "2375745"!)
>
> is that a planned behavior of R which will be maintained? for us it 
> was a bit unexpected...
>
> Yurii
>
> -----------------------------
> > a <- data.frame(x=1:3, y=1:3)
> > rownames(a) <- c("2535","59617","555")
> > a
> x y
> 2535 1 1
> 59617 2 2
> 555 3 3
> > a["5",]
> x y
> NA NA NA
> > a["555",]
> x y
> 555 3 3
> > a["2",]
> x y
> 2535 1 1
> > version
> _
> platform i386-apple-darwin9.8.0
> arch i386
> os darwin9.8.0
> system i386, darwin9.8.0
> status Under development (unstable)
> major 2
> minor 11.0
> year 2009
> month 12
> day 07
> svn rev 50688
> language R
> version.string R version 2.11.0 Under development (unstable) 
> (2009-12-07 r50688)
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Yurii Aulchenko
> Erasmus MC Rotterdam
> Department of Epidemiology, Ee 2200
> Postbus 2040, 3000 CA Rotterdam
> The Netherlands
>
> phone: +31107043486
> fax: +31107044657
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>



[Rd] extraction of sub-matrix by name
Tony Plate