Re: Babel: communicating irregular data to R source-code block

[tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye)]

Michael Hannon <jm_hannon@yahoo.com> writes:

> On Monday, April 23, 2012 at 11:44 PM Thomas S. Dye wrote:
> .
> .
> .
>> The documentation of read.table has this:
>
>> The number of data columns is determined by looking at the first five lines
>> of input (or the whole file if it has less than five lines), or from the
>> length of col.names if it is specified and is longer. This could conceivably
>> be wrong if fill or blank.lines.skip are true, so specify col.names if
>> necessary (as in the ‘Examples’).
>
>> The example is this:
>
>> read.csv(tf, fill = TRUE, header = FALSE,
>>         col.names = paste("V", seq_len(ncol), sep = ""))
>
>> where read.csv is a synonym of read.table with preset arguments.
>
>> This explains why the sixth line wraps.
> .
> .
> .
>
> Thanks, Tom.  I had just run across this myself. I guess I need to walk a mile
> in somebody's moccasins before complaining, but this behavior on the part of R
> seems totally stupid to me.
>
> I'm going to have to mull this over some more.
>
> -- Mike
>
>
Aloha Mike,

Eric Schulte has pushed up some patches designed to make R source block
variables accept irregular data.  So, with pascals-triangle(8), for
instance, one gets a potentially useful dataframe in R:

#+NAME: sanity-check
#+HEADER: :var sc_input=pascals-triangle
#+BEGIN_SRC R
sc_input
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS: sanity-check
| 1 | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil |
| 1 |   1 | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil |
| 1 |   2 |   1 | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil |
| 1 |   3 |   3 |   1 | nil | nil | nil | nil | nil |
| 1 |   4 |   6 |   4 |   1 | nil | nil | nil | nil |
| 1 |   5 |  10 |  10 |   5 | 1   | nil | nil | nil |
| 1 |   6 |  15 |  20 |  15 | 6   | 1   | nil | nil |
| 1 |   7 |  21 |  35 |  35 | 21  | 7   | 1   | nil |
| 1 |   8 |  28 |  56 |  70 | 56  | 28  | 8   | 1   |

Could you pull the development version of Org mode and see if this
solves your problem?

All the best,
Tom
 
-- 
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com