Site icon R-bloggers

New R package: a dictionary with arbitrary keys and values

[This article was first published on bioCS, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.
Coming from Python, the absence of a real dictionary in R has annoyed me for quite some time. Now, I actually needed to use vectors as keys in R:

> library(dict)
> d < - dict="" ="">->
> d[[1]] < - 42
> d[[c(2, 3)]] < - "Hello!"
> d[[“foo”]] < - "bar"
> d[[1]]
[1] 42
> d[[c(2, 3)]]
[1] “Hello!”

Under the hood, separate C++ dictionaries (unordered_map) are created for the different types of keys. Using R’s flexible types that are reflected in Rcpp (as SEXP), such a dictionary can store both numbers and strings (and other objects) at the same time.

The package is available on GitHub: https://github.com/mkuhn/dict

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: bioCS.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.