Re: [O] [0][babel][R] Undesired conversion of integers to floats in R code block output

[Eric Schulte]

Daniel Drake <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi All,
>
> I'm using R in org-mode/babel to analyze data from a psychological
> study.  The subjects in this study are identified by nine digit integers
> (e.g., 987654321) that I treat as strings (or factors) in my R data
> frames.
>
> Tables output by an R code block that contain these subject IDs are
> not formatted properly: the subject IDs seem to be treated as numbers
> and a decimal point and a trailing zero are appended.  For example,
> what should be
> |   subj.id |
> |-----------|
> | 987654321 |
> becomes
> |     subj.id |
> | 987654321.0 |
> (I've included real, self-contained code below.)
>
> When I write the data frames directly to a file from within the R code
> block (using a write.table function call that mimics the one in
> ob-R.el), the integer IDs are preserved; but when code from ob-R.el
> writes them out, the values get reformated as floats.
>
> I've noticed that eight digit integers are not modified in the same
> way, which makes me wonder if there is a 'digits' threshold I could
> modify to prevent this from happening.
>
> I've pretty much ruled out the possibility that this transformation
> occurs in R; however I'm not proficient enough in elisp to follow the
> operations that happen after the data frame is written to a file in
> the org-babel-R-write-object-command.
>
> Any pointers to help me figure this out would be very appreciated!
> (I've seen this thread:
> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/31373, but do not know
> if the conversion to calc has been made already or if it is the source
> of the problem.)
>

Hi Dan,

When I launch Emacs without any personal configuration (emacs -Q),
evaluate ob-R.el to add R support, and then execute your code blocks I
get the following behavior.

* Test
** table as generated by org-mode/babel
#+name: make
#+begin_src R  :results value  :colnames yes
  temp <- data.frame('A'=c('987654321'),'B'=c('98765432'))
  ## -- this call mimics the one in ob-R.el
  
write.table(temp,file='test_r.tsv',sep='\t',na='nil',row.names=FALSE,col.names=TRUE,quote=FALSE)
  temp
#+end_src

#+RESULTS: make
|         A |        B |
|-----------+----------|
| 987654321 | 98765432 |

** table as generated by R directly
#+name: read
#+begin_src sh  :results output
   cat test_r.tsv
#+end_src

#+RESULTS: read
: A     B
: 987654321     98765432

I would recommend installing the latest version of Org-mode from source
as that tends to fix many problems, and will at least ensure that we are
both working from the same code base moving forward.  See
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-faq.html#Keeping-current

Best,

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/