rle-package {rle}

The rle Package

Description

Common base and stats methods for rle objects, aiming to make it possible to treat them transparently as vectors.

History

This package grew out of the needs of the ergm package for a run-length encoded representation of extremely long vectors with a small number of contiguous runs, and these functions were originally implemented in the statnet.common package.

It has been split out into its own package to enable others to use this functionality without installing any unnecessary dependencies and to facilitate contributions under a simplified license.

What works and what doesn't

The long-run aim of this package is to make it possible to treat rle objects transparently as unnamed vectors. As of this writing, the biggest unimplemented feature are:

• The indexing ([ and [[) operators. It is not possible to extract or replace individual elements of the vector represented by an rle object, though it is possible to access its underlying representation (i.e., ⁠$lenths⁠ and ⁠$values⁠) by name using any of the above operators or the $ operator.

• Method rep.rle currently has limited functionality.