Typo in Episode 11, 'Reading and Writing CSV Files'

[umnik20]

Dear Community,

There is a typo in the section titled "The StringsAsFactors argument" after the second block of code that demonstrates the use of the str() function. Right after the code boxes is written "We can see that the $Color and $State columns are factors and $Speed is a numeric column", but the box shows that the $Color column is a vector of strings.

Regards,

Rodolfo

[HaoZeke]

Hi Rodolfo,
Great catch! Would you like to open a PR for this?

[strajanoski]

Dear Hao,

I tested the R code and the output looks correct, you see numbers for all other colors instead their names, as it is described in the text beneath. I went one step further as follows:
I made new fork, cloned the repository, made new branch and crated local html pages with make serve at the end. The local copy has also correct output, suggesting that there is no need of doing changes in "11-supp-read-write-csv.Rmd". I'm not a specialist, but isn't it enough just to recreate the html pages?
Please advise if I'm wrong so I can continue it looking for the problem.
Thanks.

Regards,
Slave

[Kayla-Morrell]

Hello,

It seems the text in this part of the lesson will be dependent on what version of R the user is using. As of R-4.0 the default value of stringsAsFactors() changed from being TRUE to being FALSE (a pretty big change!). So if the user is running an older version of R (<4.0) they will get what the text describes, 'Blue' being replaced with 'Green' and the other colors turning into a number because the default is to turn strings into factors. But if the user is using the most up to date version of R (>4.0) they will not see this, because strings will not be turned into factors. I guess it can be safe to assume the users will be downloading the latest version of R, but since it was only released in April it might not always be the case. Also with R-4.0, demonstrating stringsAsFactors=FALSE would be redundant since that is what the default is.

I'd be happy to discuss more to decide how this section can be revised.

Best,
Kayla

[HaoZeke]

Hi all!

We are working on how to deal with migrations (and how explicitly we should mention this on our lessons) so I'll put a hold on this for now. I believe the eventual goal is to maybe modify the output to reflect which R version is used, and then put an info bubble with the relevant information (as summarised by @Kayla-Morrell).

Best,
Rohit Goswami