[R] package for saving large datasets in ASCII

David Brahm
Mon, 12 Aug 2002 16:16:47 -0000

Ott,

I think "save.table" is a great idea!  I have a couple minor
suggestions:

1) Personally my defaults would be sep="\t", na="NA", and
col.names=(!append),
   that is, do not repeat column names if you're appending to an existing
file
   (which presumably already has them at the top).

2) An option "digits" would be great, allowing you to specify the
maximum
   digits after the decimal place.  "digits" might be a single number
(applies
   to all numeric fields), a vector (length = number of columns in x), or a
   list (whose names corresponded to the names of x you wanted to influence).
   The C code would simply round numbers to that many places; see
   src/nmath/fround.c for code that already does this.

3) I happen to like lists that are not officially dataframes; I'm glad to
see
   that save.table works just fine on these (you really test for
"list", not
   "dataframe").

I'd be willing to work on #2 with you if you'd like.
--
                              -- David Brahm (brahm at alum.mit.edu)