big.char: Create a big.char object!

In jayemerson/big.char: Provides Very Large Vectors of Character Strings

Description

Create a big.char vector of strings

Usage

big.char(length, maxchar = 8, init = NULL, names = NULL,
  backingfile = NULL, backingpath = NULL, descriptorfile = NULL,
  binarydescriptor = FALSE, shared = TRUE)

Arguments

length	the vector length
maxchar	the maximum length of the strings, 8 by default
init	an optional string for initialization purposes
names	optional names, which would be dangerous for long vectors
backingfile	optional name of binary memory-mapped file
backingpath	should be obvious, right?
descriptorfile	the descriptor file associated with the backingfile
binarydescriptor	see big.matrix
shared	see big.matrix

Details

This is the full set of details for documentation.

big.char only currently supports the basic ASCII character set, with numeric values up to 127. And surprising things may happen with special characters like tab and end-of-line; of course they look like two characters, but are really one. And surprising things may happen with ASCII codes for things like DELETE. If someone had the value 127 in a big.char data structure, this would then extract as the octal code \177 for DELETE, also a single character value. At this point, our goal is to support characters as you would expect in data analysis 99.9

Value

Returns a big.char object

Author(s)

Jay Emerson

References

None.

See Also

big.matrix

Examples

x <- big.char(5, 3, init="ABC")
x[]
x[1] <- ""

# The following triggers a warning because of the truncation:
x[-1] <- c(NA, "*", "--", "DEFG")
x[]

jayemerson/big.char documentation built on May 18, 2019, 5:57 p.m.