similar to: names( d$columnname )

Dear R wizards: is there a clean way to assign to elements in a list? what I would like to do, in pseudo R+perl notation is f <- function(a,b) list(a+b,a-b) (c,d) <- f(1,2) and have c be assigned 1+2 and d be assigned 1-2. right now, I use the clunky x <- f(1,2) c <- x[[1]] d <- x[[2]] rm(x) which seems awful. is there a nicer syntax? regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch

dear R wizards:? I am wrestling with reshape.? I have a long data set that I want to convert into a wide data set, in which rows are firms and columns are years. > summary(rin) firm fyear sim1 Min. :1004.00 Min. :1964.0 Min. : -1.00000 1st Qu.:1010.00 1st Qu.:1979.0 1st Qu.: -0.14334 Median :1016.00 Median :1986.0 Median : 0.00116 Mean

dear R wizards: an operation I execute often is the deletion of all observations (in a matrix or data set) that have at least one NA. (I now need this operation for kde2d, because its internal quantile call complains; could this be considered a buglet?) usually, my data sets are small enough for speed not to matter, and there I do not care whether my method is pretty inefficient (ok, I

dear R wizards: here is the strange question for the day. It seems to me that nrow() is very slow. Let me explain what I mean: ds= data.frame( NA, x=rnorm(10000) ) ## a sample data set > system.time( { for (i in 1:10000) NA } ) ## doing nothing takes virtually no time user system elapsed 0.000 0.000 0.001 ## this is something that should take time; we need to add 10,000

dear R experts: has someone written a function that returns the results of by() as a data frame? ??of course, this can work only if the output of the function that is an argument to by() is a numerical vector. presumably, what is now names(byobject) would become a column in the data frame, and the by object's list elements would become columns. it's a little bit like flattening the by()

Dear R Wizards---is it possible to get R to show its current call stack (sys.calls()) upon an error abort? I don't use ESS for execution, and it is often not obvious how to locate how I triggered an error in an R internal function. Seeing the call stack would make this easier. (right now, I sprinkle "cat" statements everywhere, just to locate the line where the error appears.) Of

dear R wizards: I have a large data frame, a million rows, 40 columns. In this data frame, there are some (about 100,000) rows which I want to recompute (update), while I want to leave others just as is. this is based on a condition that I need to compute, based on what is in a few of the columns. what is the right R way to do this? I could subset out the rows that I want to recompute into a

dear R experts---I am using the coef() function to pick off the coefficients from an lm() object. alas, I also need the standard errors and I need them fast. I know I can do a "summary()" on the object and pick them off this way, but this computes other stuff I do not need. Or, I can compute (X' X)^(-1) s^2 myself. Has someone written a fast se() function? incidentally, I think

this is not an important question, but I wonder why lm returns an error, and whether this can be shut off. it would seem to me that returning NA's would make more sense in some cases---after all, the problem is clearly that coefficients cannot be computed. I know that I can trap the lm.fit() error---although I have always found this to be quite inconvenient---and this is easy if I have only

dear R experts---now I have a case where I want to estimate very large regression models with many fixed effects---not just the mean type, but cross-fixed effects---years, months, locations, firms. Many millions of observations, a few thousand variables (most of these variables are interaction fixed effects). could someone please point me to packages, if any, that would help me estimate such

dear wizards: my .Rprofile has just one command for testing, loadhistory("~/.Rhistory") but this gives me an error on R startup: Error: couldn't find function "loadhistory" Invoking loadhistory() as the first interactive command works fine; incidentally, I believe loadhistory() in the .Rprofile worked in earlier or other platform R releases, too. Is the .Rprofile

dear R wizards---more ignorance on my part, exacerbated by too few examples in the function documentations. > d <- data.frame( id=rep(1:3,3), x=rnorm(9), y=rnorm(9)) Question 1: how do I work with the output of "by"? for example, > b <- by( d, d$id, function(x) coef(lm( y ~ x, data=x ) )) > b d$id: 1 (Intercept) x 0.2303 0.3618

Dear R experts--- after many years, I am planning to give in and write my first R package. I want to combine my collection of collected useful utility routines. as my guide, I am planning to use Friedrich Leisch's "Creating R Packages: A Tutorial" from Sep 2009. Is there a newer or better tutorial? this one is 4 years old. I also plan on one change---given that the

Dear R wizards: I am playing (and struggling) with the example in the constrOptim function. simple example. let's say I want to constrain my variables to be within -1 and 1. I believe I want a whole lot of constraints where ci is -1 and ui is either -1 or 1. That is, I have 2*N constraints. Should the following work? N=10 x= rep(1:N) ci= rep(-1, 2*N) ui= c(rep(1, N), rep(-1, N))

As an end-user, I wonder about Revolution R. Is the relationship between Revolution R and the R community at-large a positive one? Do the former contribute to the development efforts of the latter? Is there a competitive aspect? is their forum competitive with r-help? any other thoughts? (most of all, I simply hope that they help some of the many helpful experts on this forum, who have

Dear R wizards---I read Brian Ripley's post from 2004 which said that it was not possible to print to STDERR. Alas, I have more modest needs. I was wondering if it was possible to just send a string to STDERR with cat() while in CMD BATCH mode. Is it not possible to open STDERR in R? (Or does R use STDERR for itself and redirect it into the output stream?) This would be on a standard Unix

Dear R wizards: I decided to take the advice in the R data import/export manual and want to learn how to work with SQL for large data sets. I am trying SQLite with the DBI and RSQLite database interfaces. Speed is nice. Alas, I am struggling to find a tutorial that is geared for the kind of standard operations that I would want in R. Simple things: * how to determine the number of rows in a

Dear R wizards: I believe some more font encoding info. some of the font encodings work, others do not: IsoLatin1, MacRoman, WinAnsi, and PDFDoc seem fine. AdobeStd, AdobeSym, ISOLatin2, ISOLatin9, and TeXtext seem broken, in that the resulting output file is silently corrupt. The font encoding error does not appear in the postscript device driver, and it works fine. It would be nice if

Dear R wizards--- I have a wrapper on mclapply() that makes it a little easier for me to do multiprocessing. (Posting this may make life easier for other googlers.) I pass a data frame, a vector that tells me what rows should be recomputed, and the function; and I get back a vector or matrix of answers. d <- data.frame( id=1:6, val=11:16 ) loc <- c(TRUE,TRUE,FALSE,TRUE,FALSE,TRUE)

Dear R wizards: I am trying (finally) to build a function that might be useful to others. In particular, I want to create a summary.lme (extended lm) method that [a] adds normalized coefficients and [b] white heteroskedasticity adjusted se's and T's. I believe I already know how to do the programming to do these two, at least in simple unweighted cases. Now my challenges are just [1]