[R] Some more general questions

[Thomas W Blackwell]

For summary(), yes, you can alter the way things are displayed.
It's easiest to think of capturing the output from summary() in
a temporary variable, then displaying that variable's value, but
this could also all be done as inline code.  For example,

temp <- summary(data[[5]])
print(cbind(names(temp), format(as.numeric(temp))), quote=F)

Second question:  calling  hist()  with a vector of character
strings doesn't work, and arguably, it shouldn't.  There's no
intrinsic notion of "interval" for character strings, no sense
in which you want to discretize continuous data into a set of
contiguous, discrete "bins".  Character strings are discrete
already.  So use  barplot(table(data[[ ? ]])).  (Can't remember
which columns in your exampel would have string values.)  Or
temp <- table(data) and print the result however you want.

-  tom blackwell  -  u michigan medical school  -  ann arbor  -


On Wed, 19 Mar 2003 laurent.duperval at microcell.ca wrote:

> Some general questions.
>
> - Can I control the output of a function? For example, if I do:
> > summary(data[[5]])
>    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
>     0.0     0.0   120.0   193.3   310.0 10290.0
>
> can I control the output to be something like
>
> min=0
> q1=0.0
> q2=120.0
> q3=193.3
> max=10290.0
>
> in order to parse with an external program?
>
> - Yet another question on histograms: can I produce them with character
>   strings? I'm guessing I need to map each character value to a numerical
>   one and use that instead.
>