[datatable-help] datatable-help Digest, Vol 17, Issue 10

[Matthew Dowle]

On Fri, 2011-07-15 at 07:34 -0700, Dennis Murphy wrote:
> Re Prof. Voelkel's recent posts:
> 
> (1) Quoting does not work well in data.table; this is mentioned in
> several of the FAQs. Apropos to this discussion, some of the relevant
> ones include 1.2, 1.6 and 2.1; there may be others :)

For the archives, quoting works very well (in general) in data.table :-)
It is a deliberate design feature and we like it working that way, which
those FAQs explain. Having said that, a bug fix has been made in
v1.6.3 :
o  Mistakenly wrapping a j expression inside quotes; e.g.,
       DT[,list("sum(a),sum(b)"),by=grp]
   was appearing to work, but with wrong column names. This
   now returns a character column (the quotes should not
   be used). Thanks to Joseph Voelkel for reporting.

Will follow up the remainder of the thread at the end later.

Matthew