Ulrike Grömping wrote: > > >>>The down side to R's factor solution: > >>>The numerical values of factors are always 1 to number of levels. Thus, it > >>>can be tough and requires great care to work with studies that have both > >>>numerical values different from this and value labels. This situation is > >>>currently not well-supported by R. > >>> > >>>Regards, Ulrike > >>> > >>>P.S.: I fully agree with Frank regarding the annoyance one sometimes > >>>encounters with formats in SAS! > > > You can add an attribute to a variable. In the sas.get function in the > > Hmisc package for example, when importing SAS variables that have PROC > > FORMAT value labels, an attribute 'sas.codes' keeps the original codes; > > these can be retrieved using sas.codes(variable name). This could be > > done outside the SAS import context also. > > > > Frank > > -- > > Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine > > Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt > University > > Frank, > > are these attributes preserved when merging or subsetting a data frame? > Are they used in R packages other than Hmisc and Design (e.g. in a > simple table request)?
no; would need to add functions like those that are used by the Hmisc label or impute functions. And they are not used outside Hmisc/Design. In fact I have little need for them as I always find the final labels as the key to analysis. > > If this is the case, my wishlist items 8658 and 8659 > (http://bugs.r-project.org/cgi-bin/R/wishlist?id=8658;user=guest, > http://bugs.r-project.org/cgi-bin/R/wishlist?id=8659;user=guest) can be > closed. > Otherwise, I maintain the opinion that there are workarounds but that R > is not satisfactorily able to handle this type of data. R gives the framework for doing this elegantly but the user has an overhead of implementing new methods for such attributes. Cheers Frank > > Regards, Ulrike > > > *------- End of Original Message -------* -- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.