Base R’s stringsAsFactors default setting is supposedly the most often complained about piece of code in the whole R infrastructure. A search through the source code of all CRAN packages in December 2015 (Link) resulted in 3,492 mentions of stringsAsFactors. Most of the time these explicit mentions where found within calls to data.frame() or as.data.frame() and simply set the value to FALSE.
The hellno package provides an explicit solution to the problem without changing R itself or having to mess around with options. One could use e.g.: options("stringsAsFactors" = FALSE) to re-set the global default behavior. Instead hellno tackles the problem from another direction, namely by providing alternative implementations of data.frame() and as.data.frame(). Those re-implementations are in fact simple wrappers around base R’s very own data.frame() and as.data.frame() with stringAsFactors option set to HELLNO – which in turn equals to FALSE and gives the package its name.
Some info material and crediting for ‘hellno’ as catch phrase – thanks Clint?:
Using the package is simple – load it, note the message indicating masking two base functions and code on – from now on no type conversion will take place within data.frame() and as.data.frame():
# options(repos = c(CRAN = "https://cran.rstudio.com"))
# install.packages("hellno")
library(hellno)
##
## Attaching package: 'hellno'
##
## Die folgenden Objekte sind maskiert von 'package:base':
##
## as.data.frame, data.frame
df2 ## [1] "character"
While using hellno in interactive R is nice, in fact its real strength is that it can be imported when writing packages. Once imported stringsAsFactors=FALSE will be the default for all uses of data.frame() and as.data.frame() within all package functions BUT NOT OUTSIDE OF IT.
Thus it provides a way to ease programming while also ensuring that package users can still choose which flavor of stringsAsFactors they like best.
Let us see how this works …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com