Allow make.names() in dcast for proper column names?

[Matthieu]

Hi

I have issues when the variable that is getting casted into a new
column has white spaces for example, as columns get names with white
spaces, which cause then many problems. Typically:

aqm <- melt(airquality, id=c("Month", "Day"), na.rm=TRUE)
aqm$variable2<-factor(aqm$variable, levels=levels(aqm$variable),
labels=gsub("Ozone", "ozone with space", levels(aqm$variable)))
df<-dcast(aqm, day ~ variable2)
colnames(df)

Is there an easy solution for this? I wonder whether it would be
possible to have an optional argument "make.names=FALSE" in dcast, so
that values that get transformed into column names have a
syntactically correct name (using make.names() to correct) ?

Thanks!!

Matthieu

[Hadley Wickham]

Hi Matthieu,

You can do df$`ozone with space` - otherwise I think I was thinking it
was just as easy to fix the names yourself.

Hadley

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[Matthieu Stigler]

Hi Hadley

Sure, one can still use variables in data frame with spaces in colnames,
although this is not the standard behaviour expected in ggplot for
example. An sure, this is easy to fix, just need to add a single code line
colnames(df) <-make.names(colnames(df))

but because functions are written for lazy people, why not simplify two
lines into one? :-)

Thanks

Mat


Le 16/06/2012 15:56, Hadley Wickham a �crit :

[Hadley Wickham]

Hmmmm, I'll think about it. Could you please file an issue at
https://github.com/hadley/plyr/issues so I don't forget about it?

Thanks,

Hadley