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Object & Attributes

attributes

R Base 3.6.2

These functions access an object's attributes. The first form below returns the object's attribute list. The replacement forms uses the list on the right-hand side of the assignment as the object's attributes (if appropriate).

Syntax

R 
attributes(x)
attributes(x) <- value
mostattributes(x) <- value

Arguments

Parameter Description
x any R object
value an appropriate named list of attributes, or NULL.

Details

Unlike attr it is not an error to set attributes on a NULL object: it will first be coerced to an empty list. Note that some attributes (namely class, comment, dim, dimnames, names, row.names and tsp) are treated specially and have restrictions on the values which can be set. (Note that this is not true of levels which should be set for factors via the levels replacement function.) Attributes are not stored internally as a list and should be thought of as a set and not a vector, i.e, the order of the elements of attributes() does not matter. This is also reflected by identical()'s behaviour with the default argument attrib.as.set = TRUE. Attributes must have unique names (and NA is taken as "NA", not a missing value). Assigning attributes first removes all attributes, then sets any dim att

Examples

Example
R 
# NOT RUN {
x <- cbind(a = 1:3, pi = pi) # simple matrix with dimnames
attributes(x)

## strip an object's attributes:
attributes(x) <- NULL
x # now just a vector of length 6

mostattributes(x) <- list(mycomment = "really special", dim = 3:2,
   dimnames = list(LETTERS[1:3], letters[1:5]), names = paste(1:6))
x # dim(), but not {dim}names
# }

See Also

attr structure.