setDF's rownames argument could be a column to be converted to row names

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data

Research direction

Start at the setDF entry point and read its existing rownames handling. Compare the proposed rownames and to.row.names interfaces against the supplied data.table example, then verify that converting column a removes it and produces the expected row names while preserving column b.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

feature request

Say we had

DT <- data.table(a = c("a", "b", "c"), b = 1:3)

And we wanted

data.frame(b = 1:3, row.names = c("a", "b", "c"))

It seems we could do this all by reference via:

rn <- DT$a
DT[ , a := NULL]
setDF(DT, rownames = rn)

Seems natural to implement this via

setDF(DT, rownames = "a")

Or else add an argument:

setDF(DT, to.row.names = "a")
Dominant language
R
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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