contents {Hmisc}R Documentation

Metadata for a Data Frame

Description

contents is a generic method for which contents.data.frame is currently the only method. contents.data.frame creates an object containing the following attributes of the variables from a data frame: names, labels (if any), units (if any), number of factor levels (if any), factor levels, class, storage mode, and number of NAs. print.contents.data.frame will print the results, with options for sorting the variables. html.contents.data.frame creates HTML code for displaying the results. This code has hyperlinks so that if the user clicks on the number of levels the browser jumps to the correct part of a table of factor levels for all the factor variables.

Usage

contents(object)
contents(object)
print(x,
    sort=c('none','names','labels','NAs'), prlevels=TRUE, ...) 
html(object,  sort=c('none','names','labels','NAs'), prlevels=TRUE,
           file=paste('contents',obj$dfname,'html',sep='.'),
           append=FALSE, ...)

Arguments

object a data frame. For html is an object created by contents.
x an object created by contents
sort Default is to print the variables in their original order in the data frame. Specify one of "names", "labels", or "NAs" to sort the variables by, respectively, alphabetically by names, alphabetically by labels, or by increaseing order of number of missing values.
prlevels set to FALSE to not print all levels of factor variables
file file to which to write the html code. Default is "conents.dfname.html" where dfname is the name of the data frame processed by contents.
append set to TRUE to add html code to an existing file
... arguments passed from html to format.df

Value

an object of class "contents.data.frame"

Author(s)

Frank Harrell
University of Virginia
fharrell@virginia.edu

See Also

describe, html

Examples

set.seed(1)
dfr <- data.frame(x=rnorm(400),y=sample(c('male','female'),400,TRUE))
contents(dfr)
k <- contents(dfr)
print(k, sort='names', prlevels=FALSE)

html(k)
html(contents(dfr))            # same result
w <- html(k, file='my.html')   # create my.html, don't display


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