From w.huber at dkfz-heidelberg.de  Fri Oct 24 08:26:38 2003
From: w.huber at dkfz-heidelberg.de (w.huber@dkfz-heidelberg.de)
Date: Fri Oct 24 08:26:09 2003
Subject: [Rd] Accessing data files w/ --use-zip-data
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.20.0310231116360.13471-100000@santiam.dfci.harvard.edu>
References: <Pine.SOL.4.20.0310231116360.13471-100000@santiam.dfci.harvard.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.53.0310240820240.3958@herkules>


Hi all,

> The issue that Duncan suggested I raise is whether or not it should be
> considered accepted behaviour for a package author to be accessing files
> in <pkg>\data (at this time I don't know the reasoning behind the specific
> example here, I just know that that's what they've done) or if this should
> be considered a Bad Thing.

Examples are the makecdfenv und matchprobes packages, part of which I
wrote. They deal with data formats that are external to R, namely vendor
(Affymetrix) specific file formats, and provide tools for importing these
data into R. For the examples / vignettes, I need to provide example data
files. Up to now I am putting them into the data directory, and access
them with

specializedImportFunction(file.path(.path.package("matchprobes"),
                          "data", "HG-U95Av2_probe_tab.gz"), ...)

Is this considered offensive to the R package structure? Whereelse to put
data that comes in specialized (not .rda, .txt, .csv) formats?

Thanks
  Wolfgang


[Rd] Accessing data files w/ --use-zip-data
w.huber@dkfz-heidelberg.de