> Take a look at plyr and reshape packages (http://had.co.nz/), I have a hunch > that they would have saved me a lot of headache had I found out about them > earlier :)
As the author of these two packages, I'm admittedly biased, but I think R is unparalleled for data preparation, manipulation, and cleaning (with the small caveat that your data needs to fit in memory). The R data frame is a fantastic abstraction that most other programming languages lack, and vectorised subscripting make it possible to express many transformations in an elegant and efficient manner. On top of the facilities provided by base R, there are a huge number of packages available to load data from just about every data format, as well as a number of packages (plyr, reshape, sqldf, doBy, gdata, scope, ...) for data manipulation - just pick the metaphor that is most natural to you. Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
