decodeCharColumns: Decode character columns.
In talegari/sidekicks: A Misc Set of Functions for Data Analysis

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Examples

Decode a subset of character columns which were encoded using base64 encoding.

1	decodeCharColumns(df, columnNames)

`df`	A dataframe
`columnNames`	The columns which are to be decoded. If NULL, 'encodedColumnNames' attribute is checked. It is advised not to leave it NULL.

Texual data in dataframes with comman seperators like ',' create problems writing to disk and reading back. The function 'encodeCharCols' encodes the a subset of character columns using base64 encoding where the resulting dataframe might be written to disk with ',' separator. The function 'decodeCharCols' decodes the encoded character columns are restores back the actual character columns.

A dataframe

iris2 <- iris
iris2$Species <- as.character(iris2$Species)
iris_enc <- encodeCharColumns(iris2)
iris_enc
unique(iris_enc$Species)
iris_dec <- decodeCharColumns(iris_enc, "Species")
iris_dec
all.equal(iris_dec, iris2)