[datatable-help] Characters and Factor

[Damian Betebenner]

All,

Not sure how to characterize this (a new feature or a bug) but the behavior is causing problems in code I've written that previously work as I expected. I have integers that are bigger than 2^32 that
I have to encode as factors, after doing some data.table stuff (like below), it recorders the factors as characters and corrupts subsequent merges back to tables where these factors are ordered as
"integers".

Remedies?

tmp.dt1 <- data.table(X=as.factor(1:10), Y=rnorm(10), key="X")
tmp.dt2 <- data.table(X=as.factor(101:110), Y=rnorm(10), key="X")

rbind(tmp.dt1, tmp.dt2)

       V1           Y
[1,]   1  0.47655333
[2,]   2 -0.43962704
[3,]   3 -0.78312270
[4,]   4  1.88935392
[5,]   5 -0.56413463
[6,]   6 -0.69177767
[7,]   7 -0.09942112
[8,]   8  0.21452552
[9,]   9 -0.86136222
[10,]  10  0.55623427
[11,] 101  0.02090036
[12,] 102 -0.41816481
[13,] 103  0.04798975
[14,] 104  0.93709966
[15,] 105 -0.95835181
[16,] 106  0.82207890
[17,] 107  0.85902512
[18,] 108  1.33042023
[19,] 109  0.22596849
[20,] 110  0.99209054

data.table(rbind(tmp.dt1, tmp.dt2), key="X")
        X           Y
[1,]   1 -0.16225884
[2,]  10  0.82979617
[3,] 101  0.22412653
[4,] 102 -0.24841475
[5,] 103 -0.09914182
[6,] 104 -1.47982574
[7,] 105 -1.79957210
[8,] 106 -2.01715940
[9,] 107 -0.81900855
[10,] 108  0.26357249
[11,] 109 -1.22742679
[12,] 110  0.64773494
[13,]   2 -0.98312948
[14,]   3  0.99937771
[15,]   4 -1.72355977
[16,]   5 -2.02481542
[17,]   6 -0.07222688
[18,]   7  0.17921321
[19,]   8 -0.92102526
[20,]   9 -0.14129584



data.table(rbind(tmp.dt1, tmp.dt2), key="X")




Damian Betebenner
Center for Assessment
PO Box 351
Dover, NH   03821-0351

Phone (office): (603) 516-7900
Phone (cell): (857) 234-2474
Fax: (603) 516-7910

dbetebenner at nciea.org<mailto:dbetebenner at nciea.org>
www.nciea.org<http://www.nciea.org/>



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