[ARROW-7825] [R] Update docs to clarify that stringsAsFactors isn't relevant for parquet/feather

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: 0.16.0
• Component/s: R
• Labels: R parquet
• Environment: Linux 64-bit 5.4.15
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/24055
• Assignee: Neal Richardson
• Reporter: Keith Hughitt
• Created: 10/Feb/20 17:27
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 07:56
• Resolved: 15/May/20 21:34

Description

Same issue as reported for feather::read_feather (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-7823);

 

For the R arrow package, the "read_parquet()" function currently does not respect "options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)", leading to unexpected/inconsistent behavior.

 

Example:

 

 

library(arrow)
library(readr)
options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
write_tsv(head(iris), 'test.tsv')
write_parquet(head(iris), 'test.parquet')
head(read.delim('test.tsv', sep='\t')$Species)
# [1] "setosa" "setosa" "setosa" "setosa" "setosa" "setosa"
head(read_tsv('test.tsv', col_types = cols())$Species)
# [1] "setosa" "setosa" "setosa" "setosa" "setosa" "setosa"
head(read_parquet('test.parquet')$Species)
# [1] setosa setosa setosa setosa setosa setosa
# Levels: setosa versicolor virginica

 

 

Versions:

• R 3.6.2

• arrow_0.15.1.9000

Issue Links

• is related to: ARROW-7823 Have feather::read_feather respect options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)