[Rcpp-devel] idiom for determining the (S3) class of an R object?

[Romain Francois]

Le 02/12/10 22:40, Douglas Bates a écrit :
> I currently use constructions like
>
> 	if (as<string>(lst.attr("class")) != "family")
> 	    throw std::runtime_error("glmFamily requires a list of (S3) class
> \"family\"");
>
> Is there a cleaner way that I haven't discovered yet.
>
> This method is error-prone because the S3 class of an object is a
> CharacterVector whose length can be greater than 1, so the check
> should compare against the individual strings in that vector until it
> finds a match or runs out of elements.
>
> It is not a great challenge to write a short function that will return
> a boolean given an object and a target class as a std::string, but I
> would prefer not to reinvent the wheel unless I need to.

I don't think we have this wheel. We could add a method like this in 
RObject :

bool inherits( const std::string& clazz ) ;

This would be a neat addition.

Romain

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Romain Francois
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