From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Fri Sep 14 15:25:12 2012
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2012 14:25:12 +0100
Subject: [Rd] as.data.frame.character lacks nm= argument
In-Reply-To: <CACk-te1N4cN=cNeunL8zSn6SUVRis+rgbb8gvVg7mx61b2wdbQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <E66794E69CFDE04D9A70842786030B9331BFED@PA-MBX04.na.tibco.com>
	<CACk-te1N4cN=cNeunL8zSn6SUVRis+rgbb8gvVg7mx61b2wdbQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <50533038.9040808@stats.ox.ac.uk>

On 13/09/2012 21:48, Bert Gunter wrote:
> Bill:
>
> as.data.frame.character() has no nm, argument, so providing one causes
> the error as you can see from the code. Presumably, this is what you
> meant by bug/inconsistency, right?

This is using an undocumented argument, 'nm'.  I don't believe anything 
is said about what might happen if you do that except that it will be 
passed to methods -- they are not obliged to accept it.

If it were intended for this to be a feature, I think the author might 
have chosen a less opaque name than 'nm'.

Where we go from here is under discussion in R-core.

>
> -- Bert
>
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:32 PM, William Dunlap <wdunlap at tibco.com> wrote:
>> Is the following behavior with as.data.frame(nm=...) a bug?  It is an inconsistency:
>>
>>> as.data.frame(LETTERS[1:10], nm="FirstTenLetters")
>> Error in as.data.frame.vector(x, ..., nm = nm) :
>>    formal argument "nm" matched by multiple actual arguments
>>
>> nm= works for integer arguments:
>>
>>> as.data.frame(1:10, nm="OneToTen")
>>     OneToTen
>> 1         1
>> 2         2
>> 3         3
>> 4         4
>> 5         5
>> 6         6
>> 7         7
>> 8         8
>> 9         9
>> 10       10
>>
>> Bill Dunlap
>> Spotfire, TIBCO Software
>> wdunlap tibco.com
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>
>


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



[Rd] as.data.frame.character lacks nm= argument
Prof Brian Ripley