[R] In praise of "options(warnPartialMatchDollar = TRUE)"

[Chris Evans]

I am just posting this to the list because someone else may one day waste an hour or so because s/he has unknowingly hit a partial match failure using "$". It's my folly that I did but I am surprised that options(warnPartialMatchDollar = TRUE) isn't the default setting. 

Here's a bit of reproducible code that shows the challenge. 

#rm(list=ls()) ### BEWARE: me making sure environment was clean 
set.seed(12345) # get fully reproducible example 
nRows <- 100 
Sample <- sample(0:1,nRows,replace=TRUE) 
data2 <- data.frame(cbind(1:nRows,Sample)) # create data frame 
table(data2$Samp) # call which silently achieves partial match 
data2$innoccuousname <- factor(data2$Samp,labels=c("Non-clinical","Clinical"),levels=0:1) 
str(data2$Samp) # all fine, no apparent destruction of the non-existent vector data2$Samp 
data2$SampFac <- factor(data2$Samp,labels=c("Non-clinical","Clinical"),levels=0:1) 
str(data2$Samp) # returns NULL because there is no longer a single partial match to "Samp" but no warning! 
str(data2$Sample) # but of course, data2$Sample is still there 

Because I had used "data2$Samp" all the way through a large file of R (markup) code and hadn't noticed that the variable names in the SPSS file I was reading in had changed from "Samp" to "Sample" I appeared to be destroying data2$Samp. 

I have now set options(warnPartialMatchDollar = TRUE) in my Rprofile.site file and am just posting this here in case it helps someone some day. 

Very best all, 


Chris 


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