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[S] Dumb questions of the day - data frame column "descriptions" and oth

To: "'s-news@wubios.wustl.edu'" <s-news@wubios.wustl.edu>
Subject: [S] Dumb questions of the day - data frame column "descriptions" and other "features"
From: Steve Roberts <sroberts@PICR.man.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 21:54:39 +0100
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Hi all,

Using S+/Windows v4.0 I have imported a SAS dataset through the Windows
Import menus. In order to remind myself what the cryptic SAS variable
names mean I used the data frame editor to enter a "Description" into
the properties box for each column. Gived the poor quality of this
editor I kind of thought this might be a bad isea, but was feelig
optimistic :-) I then go back to "real S" and would like to access these
descriptive names, but can't find them anywhere. If nothing else I would
like to print out a direrectory of the names and what they are. Is this
"feature" of the inbuilt editor just a black hole for keystrokes? 

I also noticed if I converted a column to a factor the decription was
lost - another nice "feature" of the data editor.

Of course what I would like to do is to print reports with nice
descriptive labels rather than the terse column names...

Oh and another "feature" I noticed. I changed the properties of some of
the columns to "date" as that is what they were (surprisingly the SAS
dates got through unscathed once I changed the format), but print prints
them as meaningless numbers not dates - even though the data editor
shows dates. Can anyone enlighten me as to what is going on here? Sounds
like a bug to me. (workround - do horrible things with dates() and
cbind).

I suspect the answer is the one I already knew - beware of the data
editor!?

Steve.
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