Table of Contents

R - (Object|Variable|Symbol)

About

R provides a number of specialized objects. They are created (instantiated), used and referenced through variable (known as symbol).

The variable (symbol) references objects.

The symbols are themselves objects and has wide ranging effects.

R have some reserved variable (system variable)

Example

> x=1
# Implicit printing of the variable
> x   
[1] 1
# Explicit printing of the variable
> print(x)

The [1] indicates that x is of the vector class

> x+x
[1] 2

Structure

Type

The type determine the internal storage and can be seen as the primitive type of R.

See R - (Datatype|Type|Storage Mode) of an object (typeof, mode)

Class

The class properties permits R to have an object like behavior.

R supports several class (data structure) for an object:

And you can create yours.

Attribute

All objects except the NULL object can have one or more attributes.

Common R objects attributes are:

Attributes of an object can be listed using the attributes() function.

# data.frame object
x=data.frame(a=1:4,b=1:4,c=1:4)
attributes(x)
$names
[1] "a" "b" "c"

$row.names
[1] 1 2 3 4

$class
[1] "data.frame"

The value of a specific attribute can be obtained using the attr() function (or NULL if the attribute is not defined).

For example,

# data.frame object
x=data.frame(a=1:4,b=1:4,c=1:4)
attr(x, "class")
[1] "data.frame"

Management

Rename

newname <- oldname
rm(oldname)

List

List current objects (objects in the workspace)

ls()

ls shows you the variables

> x <- rnorm(50)
> y <- rnorm(x)
> ls()
[1] "x" "y"

Delete

rm(object)

# Delete all variables for the environment
rm(list = ls())
> rm(x, y)
> ls()
character(0)

Copy

newobject <- edit(object)

Diff

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/diffobj/README.html

Serialization

apropos (or find) returns a character vector of all objects matching the text searched.

apropos("myObject")

Functions

Structure

Structure of an object

str(object)  

Fix / Edit

# Open an editor and doesn't gives the possibility to change the definition
edit(object)
# 
# Open an editor and gives the possibility to change the values.
fix(object)  

View

View(object)

where object is an object that can be coerced to a data frame