fread arg priority between select and colClasses

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data

Research direction

Start at the fread entry point and reproduce the issue with the minimal select=1:2 and unnamed colClasses example from the report. Compare it with the named colClasses example; done means the selected columns accept the supplied types without requiring names, while existing behavior remains covered by tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug fread
require(data.table) # 1.12.4
txt <- "1,2,3\n"
fread(txt, select=1:2, colClasses=c("integer", "character"))
# Error in fread(txt, select = 1:2, colClasses = c("integer", "character")) : 
#   colClasses= is an unnamed vector of types, length 2, but there are 3 columns in the input. To 
#  specify types for a subset of columns, you can use a named vector, list format, or specify types 
# using select= instead of colClasses=. Please see examples in ?fread.```

Here, the fact that select is the first 2 columns should make it clear that colClasses is sufficient for the first 2 columns, isn't it?

fread(txt, select=1:2, colClasses=c(V1="integer", V2="character"))
#    V1 V2
# 1:  1  2

works but shouldn't be necessary in my opinion.

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