[datatable-help] Unexpected behavior in setnames()

[Eduard Antonyan]

The main usage case I've personally encountered is data presentation (for
either self or others), where I would sometimes organize data like so:

category1 name,colname1,colname2,category2 name,colname1,colname2
....numbersandstuff....

Also, in general there are many cases I brought up above that generate
duplicate names, and I definitely don't want either lost columns or renamed
columns as a result - both are data loss that I don't appreciate.


On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 7:10 PM, Steve Lianoglou <lianoglou.steve at gene.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 8:41 AM, Arunkumar Srinivasan
> <aragorn168b at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> > Overall, I agree keeping duplicate names may help some users. But then,
> the
> > potential side-effects should be marked with warnings/errors distinctly,
> in
> > all cases (and preferably documented).
> [/snip]
>
> I guess I must have missed it, but has anyone anywhere (in this
> thread, a FR or something) actually present a (concrete) compelling
> situation where allowing duplicate column names was actually useful?
>
> I'm hard pressed to come up with any situation where (purposefully)
> keeping duplicate column names in a data.table has more benefit than
> downside. Seems to me that if this ever happens, it most certainly
> would be by mistake.
>
> Can someone help me out here?
>
> In the case of cbinding two data.tables together that end up having
> two duplicate names, I'd imagine unique-ing the names of the
> data.tables and firing a warning that this was done would be most
> useful (uniqueness priority would be from left to right as the
> data.tables are passed into the cbind call)
>
> -steve
>
> --
> Steve Lianoglou
> Computational Biologist
> Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
> Genentech
>
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