R devel - Aug 2012 - Don't dput() data frames?

/src/main/attrib.c contains this comment in row_names_gets():

  /* This should not happen, but if a careless user dput()s a
           data frame and sources the result, it will */

which svn blame says Prof Ripley placed there in r39830 with the
commit message "correct the work of dput() on the row names of a data
frame with compact representation."

Is there a problem / better way to use the result of a hefty dput than
source()ing it? This seems to work rather robustly:

data(iris)
source(textConnection(paste0("iris2 <- ",
capture.output(dput(iris)))))
identical(iris, iris2)

Cheers,
Michael

On Aug 28, 2012, at 1:51 PM, R. Michael Weylandt wrote:
> /src/main/attrib.c contains this comment in row_names_gets():
> 
>  /* This should not happen, but if a careless user dput()s a
>           data frame and sources the result, it will */
> 
> which svn blame says Prof Ripley placed there in r39830 with the
> commit message "correct the work of dput() on the row names of a data
> frame with compact representation."
> 
> Is there a problem / better way to use the result of a hefty dput than
> source()ing it?
It's pretty much the least efficient and most dangerous (as in insecure)
way. That's why there is serialization instead ...

Cheers,
Simon


> This seems to work rather robustly:
> 
> data(iris)
> source(textConnection(paste0("iris2 <- ",
capture.output(dput(iris)))))
> identical(iris, iris2)
> 
> Cheers,
> Michael
> 
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