[R] why is this a factor?

[Ista Zahn]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Steve Lianoglou
<lianoglou.steve at gene.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 3:58 PM, Ista Zahn <istazahn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Or go all the way and put
>>
>> options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
>>
>> at the top your script or in your .Rprofile. This will prevent this
>> kind of annoyance in the future without having to say stringsAsFactors
>> = FALSE all the time.
>
> I go back and forth about doing this too (setting a global hammer to
> stringsAsFactors), but then other things might mess up -- imagine a
> scenario where a package is written with the assumption that the
> default `stringsAsFactors=TRUE` setting hasn't been changed, which
> could then break when you go the nuclear-global-override route.

Yes, possibly, but I've yet to have that problem, whereas before I
started changing it globally things used to break fairly regularly.

Best,
Ista
>
> -steve
>
> --
> Steve Lianoglou
> Computational Biologist
> Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
> Genentech