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String coercion inserts spaces, as.matrix.data.table #4209
Description
When coercing from a data.table to a matrix and types are coerced (yes this is bad and shouldn't be done, so this is definitely low-priority), a data.table inserts spaces whereas a data.frame does not:
> as.matrix(data.frame(a = LETTERS[1:2], b = c(FALSE, TRUE)))
a b
[1,] "A" "FALSE"
[2,] "B" "TRUE"
> as.matrix(data.table(a = LETTERS[1:2], b = c(FALSE, TRUE)))
a b
[1,] "A" "FALSE"
[2,] "B" " TRUE"I assume this is a result of C++ typing somehow, but I don't know enough to make a PR, sorry.
Activity
MichaelChirico commentedon Jan 30, 2020
as.matrix.data.frameusesas.characterfor logical columns, whereasas.matrix.data.tableusesformat--formatadds the space.@sritchie73 is this covered by your ongoing #4144? I was unable to install & test myself for the moment
MichaelChirico commentedon Jan 30, 2020
In fact, it seems this is something that was fixed quite recently in
baseR itself!wch/r-source@bd3b7ef
So I guess our issue is a vestige of the same logic being copied over from
as.matrix.data.framemany years agosritchie73 commentedon Jan 30, 2020
This is fixed in #4144 , this is the output I see on my working test branch:
The current version of data.table on CRAN simply uses
base::unlist(), while #4144 is implemented in C and uses our internal memrecycle function which has the correct desired behaviour:[-]String coercion inserts spaces[/-][+]String coercion inserts spaces, as.matrix.data.table[/+]