Hello all
I noticed today that you can access dataframe columns by using incomplete
names. This is a really unexpected behavior which led to some unexpected errors
and I was wondering whether it's a bug or not and whether it should be changed
in the future.
Here's a working example using the preinstalled "swiss" dataset:
> head(swiss)
Fertility Agriculture Examination Education Catholic
Courtelary 80.2 17.0 15 12 9.96
Delemont 83.1 45.1 6 9 84.84
Franches-Mnt 92.5 39.7 5 5 93.40
Moutier 85.8 36.5 12 7 33.77
Neuveville 76.9 43.5 17 15 5.16
Porrentruy 76.1 35.3 9 7 90.57
Infant.Mortality
Courtelary 22.2
Delemont 22.2
Franches-Mnt 20.2
Moutier 20.3
Neuveville 20.6
Porrentruy 26.6
> swiss$E
NULL
> swiss$Ex
[1] 15 6 5 12 17 9 16 14 12 16 14 21 14 19 22 18 17 26 31 19 22 14 22 20 12
[26] 14 6 16 25 15 3 7 5 12 7 9 3 13 26 29 22 35 15 25 37 16 22
> swiss$Ed
[1] 12 9 5 7 15 7 7 8 7 13 6 12 7 12 5 2 8 28 20 9 10 3 12 6 1
[26] 8 3 10 19 8 2 6 2 6 3 9 3 13 12 11 13 32 7 7 53 29 29
So in order to access the column "Examination", I can type any substring from
"Ex" to "Examination" and will always get the column swiss$Examination.
Thanks for reading and Greetings
Yannick Suter
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