[R] Counting number of rain

Rolf Turner r.turner at auckland.ac.nz
Fri Oct 2 03:22:59 CEST 2015


On 02/10/15 10:54, peter dalgaard wrote:

>> On 01 Oct 2015, at 23:04 , Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz>
>> wrote:
>>
>> On 02/10/15 03:45, David L Carlson wrote:
>>
>> <SNIP>
>>
>>> If you want the month names:
>>>
>>>> mnt <- c("Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun",
>>> + "July", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec")
>>>> dimnames(tbl)$Month <- mnt
>>
>> <SNIP>
>>
>> Unnecessary typing; there is a built-in data set "month.abb" (in
>> the "base" package) that is identical to your "mnt".
>>
>> Difficult (nearly impossible!) to find, but, if you can't quite
>> remember the name!  I *knew* I'd seen it, so I persisted and
>> eventually tracked it down.
>>
>> Strangely ??month or help.search("month") yield no trace of it.
>> Pages and pages of (useless!) output but no sign of "month.abb"
>> (nor of "month.name" which gives the unabbreviated month names).
>>
>> Can anyone explain to me why "??" and help.search() are of no help
>> here?
>
> Umm,
>
> ------- Help files with alias or concept or title matching ‘month’
> using fuzzy matching:
>
>
> base::Constants         Built-in Constants Aliases: month.abb,
> month.name .... -------

Hmm. When I did ??month I got a completely different display. It
contained *absolutely no* mention of month.abb. That *seems* to be
because I have help_type set to "html". When I re-set help_type to
"text", I get a display like unto the one that you obtained (and it does 
indeed lead one to month.abb).

It seems to me ver' strange that one gets a different collection of
information under help_type="text" than one does under help_type="html".
If I were me, I would classify this as a bug.

> Also, entering "month<TAB><TAB>" gives the completions
>
>> month
> month.abb      monthplot      months.Date month.name     months
> months.POSIXt

Yes, I eventually managed to come up with this trick as well.  But that 
is not really relevant to the phenomenon that "??" or help.search() 
don't work effectively, or at least not consistently (the effectiveness 
appearing to depend --- for some bizarre reason --- on the value of 
help_type).

cheers,

Rolf

P.S. I have been unable to find a corresponding vector of the names of 
the days of the week, although I have a very vague recollection of the 
existence of such a vector.  Does it exist, and if so what is it called?
Or is my recollection an illusion brought on by advancing senility?

R.

-- 
Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276



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