[R] Display of NAs in character columns of a data frame under fix() or edit().

[Peter Dalgaard]

On 11/02/2010 09:45 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
> 
> Example:
> 
> 	xxx <- data.frame(x=1:26,y=letters)
> 	xxx$x[c(2,4,6,8)] <- NA
> 	xxx$y[c(1,3,5,7)] <- NA
> 
> 	yyy <- edit(yyy)
> 
> The missing values in xxx$y appear as blanks in the spreadsheet window that
> appears, whereas the missing values in the numeric column "x" appear as "NA"
> (as I would expect).
> 
> Is this a bug or a feature?

Probably feature, How would you enter abbreviations for North America,
Noradrenaline, Neil Adams, etc...? On the other hand, it is currently
impossible to make a field blank.

Actually, the whole edit() interface is a bit of a long-standing bug.
It's been with us "forever" (as far as I remember, the spreadsheet
interface actually predates data frames in R). It was constructed using
very basic GUI elements on Windows and X11, and it never _quite_ did
what you'd want it to do.

Ideas about how to do better seem to have gotten stuck in indecision
about which graphical toolkit to use. The Rcmdr has a data viewer (but
not editor) written with the Tcl/Tk interface, which might be a starting
point.

-- 
Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com