classIndex {Ecfun}

Convert class to an integer 1-8 and vice versa

Description

classIndex converts the class of x to an integer:

1. NULL

2. logical

3. integer

4. numeric

5. complex

6. raw

7. character

8. other

index2class converts an integer back to the corresponding class.

Usage

classIndex(x)
index2class(i, otherCharacter=TRUE)

Arguments

x

an object whose class index is desired.

i

an integer to be converted to the name of the corresponding class

otherCharacter

logical: TRUE to convert 8 to "character"; FALSE to convert 8 to "other".

Details

The Writing R Extensions lists six different kinds of "atomic vectors": logical, integer, numeric, complex, character, and raw: See also Wickham (2013, section on "Atomic vectors" in the chapter on "Data structures"). These form a standard hierarchy, except for "raw", in that standard operations combining objects with different atomic classes will create an object of the higher class. For example, TRUE + 2 + pi returns a numeric object ((approximately 6.141593). Similarly, paste(1, 'a') returns the character string "1 a".

For "interpolation", we might expect users interpolating between objects of class "raw" (i.e., bytes) might most likely prefer "Numeric" to "Character" interpolation, coerced back to type "raw".

The index numbers for the classes run from 1 to 8 to make it easy to convert them back from integers to character strings.

Value

classIndex returns an integer between 1 and 7 depending on class(x).

index2class returns a character string for the inverse transformation.

Author(s)

Spencer Graves

References

Wickham, Hadley (2014) Advanced R, especially Wickham (2013, section on "Atomic vectors" in the chapter on "Data structures").

See Also

interpChar

Examples

##
## 1.  classIndex
##
x1 <- classIndex(NULL)
x2 <- classIndex(logical(0))
x3 <- classIndex(integer(1))
x4 <- classIndex(numeric(2))
x5 <- classIndex(complex(3))
x6 <- classIndex(raw(4))
x7 <- classIndex(character(5))
x8 <- classIndex(list())

# check 

all.equal(c(x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, x6, x7, x8), 1:8)


##
## 2.  index2class 
##
c1 <- index2class(1)
c2 <- index2class(2)
c3 <- index2class(3)
c4 <- index2class(4)
c5 <- index2class(5) 
c6 <- index2class(6) 
c7 <- index2class(7)
c8 <- index2class(8)
c8o <- index2class(8, FALSE)

# check 

all.equal(c(c1, c2, c3, c4, c5, c6, c7, c8, c8o), 
          c('NULL', 'logical', 'integer', 'numeric', 
            'complex', 'raw', 'character', 'character', 
            'other'))