Get metadata from fread()
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100
Research direction
Start by reading fread() and the verbose=TRUE behavior described in the issue, including how metadata is currently reported. Compare the proposed fglimpse() or R-object approach with the intermediate attribute-based option. Done means the selected interface returns the requested metadata—such as rows, columns, headers, colClasses, and sample values—without requiring the full fread result.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
First appeared in #3540 but moved to a separate issue.
--
It would be great if fread or a dedicated function built upon the already implemented functionality of fread could create an R object or a yaml counterpart representing the metadata of the file (or command, input) argument of fread. So instead of running fread the user could just call fglimpse and get back the number of rows, columns, column header, colClasses, sample of values etc.
As an intermediate step, it might be enough to be able to get back the metadata that fread figures out automagically as an R object (probably as an attribute of the fread result) - just as if verbose = TRUE returned the results as a list instead of printing it to stdout.
- Dominant language
- R
- Stars
- 3.9k
- Forks
- 1.1k
- Avg merge
- 14h 4m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 4
Contributor guide
First steps
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