The (Storage) Mode of an Object

Description

Get or set the ‘mode’ (a kind of ‘type’), or the storage mode of an R object.

Usage

mode(x)
mode(x) <- value
storage.mode(x)
storage.mode(x) <- value

Arguments

Details

Both mode and storage.mode return a character string giving the (storage) mode of the object — often the same — both relying on the output of typeof(x), see the example below.

mode(x) <- "newmode" changes the mode of object x to newmode. This is only supported if there is an appropriate as.newmode function, for example "logical", "integer", "double", "complex", "raw", "character", "list", "expression", "name", "symbol" and "function". Attributes are preserved (but see below).

storage.mode(x) <- "newmode" is a more efficient primitive version of mode<-, which works for "newmode" which is one of the internal types (see typeof), but not for "single". Attributes are preserved.

As storage mode "single" is only a pseudo-mode in R, it will not be reported by mode or storage.mode: use attr(object, "Csingle") to examine this. However, mode<- can be used to set the mode to "single", which sets the real mode to "double" and the "Csingle" attribute to TRUE. Setting any other mode will remove this attribute.

Note (in the examples below) that some calls have mode "(" which is S compatible.

Mode names

Modes have the same set of names as types (see typeof) except that

• types "integer" and "double" are returned as "numeric".

• types "special", "builtin" and "closure" are returned as "function".

• type "symbol" is called mode "name".

• type "language" is returned as "(" or "call".

References

⁠Becker RA, Chambers JM, Wilks AR (1988). The New S Language. Chapman and Hall/CRC, London.

See Also

typeof for the R-internal ‘mode’ or ‘type’, type.convert, attributes.

Examples

require(stats)

sapply(options(), mode)

cex3 <- c("NULL", "1", "1:1", "1i", "list(1)", "data.frame(x = 1)",
  "pairlist(pi)", "c", "lm", "formals(lm)[[1]]",  "formals(lm)[[2]]",
  "y ~ x","expression((1))[[1]]", "(y ~ x)[[1]]",
  "expression(x <- pi)[[1]][[1]]")
lex3 <- sapply(cex3, function(x) eval(str2lang(x)))
mex3 <- t(sapply(lex3,
                 function(x) c(typeof(x), storage.mode(x), mode(x))))
dimnames(mex3) <- list(cex3, c("typeof(.)","storage.mode(.)","mode(.)"))
mex3

## This also makes a local copy of 'pi':
storage.mode(pi) <- "complex"
storage.mode(pi)
rm(pi)