Dataframe package

Dataframe, Data manipulation toolbox similar to R data.frame

At an mature development stage. hg

• Maintainer: Pascal Dupuis
• Contributors:

• Package: dataframe

This package permits to handle complex (both in the sense of complex numbers and high complexity) data as if they were ordinary arrays, except that each column MAY possess a different type. It also complete a fairly complete interface to CSV files, permitting to cope with a number of oddities, like f.i. CSV files starting with a header spread over a few lines. The resulting array tries as far as it can to mimick an array, in such a way that binary operators and usual functions will work as expected.

Meta-information is also handled. Rows and columns may have a name, and this name is searchable. If for whatever reason the ordering of a CSV file changes, searching by column names will return the expected information.

A simple example:

truc={"Id", "Name", "Type";1, "onestring", "bla"; 2, "somestring", "foobar";}
truc =
{
  [1,1] = Id
  [2,1] =  1
  [3,1] =  2
  [1,2] = Name
  [2,2] = onestring
  [3,2] = somestring
  [1,3] = Type
  [2,3] = bla
  [3,3] = foobar
}
>> tt=dataframe(truc)
tt = dataframe with 2 rows and 3 columns
_1     Id       Name   Type
Nr double       char   char
 1      1  onestring    bla
 2      2 somestring foobar

The first cell line is intended to contain column names; the rest is column content. The type is automatically inferred from the cell content. Now let us select one column by its name:

>> tt(:, 'Name')
ans = dataframe with 2 rows and 1 columns
_1       Name
Nr       char
1  onestring
2 somestring

In this case, a sub-dataframe is returned. Struct-like indexing is also implemented:

>> tt.Id
ans =
  1
  2

When the output is a vector and can be simplified to something simple ... it is.