in my previous question about using serialize () to create CSV objects, I got a great answer from jmoy, where he recommended encoding my serialized base64 text. This is exactly what I was looking for. Oddly enough, when I try to put this into practice, I get results that look right, but do not exactly match what I was looking at during serialization / coding.
The following example presents a list with 3 vectors and each vector is serialized. Then each vector is encoded with base64 and written to a text file along with the key. The key is simply the index number of the vector. Then I cancel the process and read each line back from csv. At the very end, you can see that some elements do not match exactly . Is this a floating point problem? Something else?
require(caTools)
randList <- NULL
set.seed(2)
randList[[1]] <- rnorm(100)
randList[[2]] <- rnorm(200)
randList[[3]] <- rnorm(300)
#delete file contents
fileName <- "/tmp/tmp.txt"
cat("", file=fileName, append=F)
i <- 1
for (item in randList) {
myLine <- paste(i, ",", base64encode(serialize(item, NULL, ascii=T)), "\n", sep="")
cat(myLine, file=fileName, append=T)
i <- i+1
}
linesIn <- readLines(fileName, n=-1)
parsedThing <- NULL
i <- 1
for (line in linesIn){
parsedThing[[i]] <- unserialize(base64decode(strsplit(linesIn[[i]], split=",")[[1]][[2]], "raw"))
i <- i+1
}
#floating point issue?
identical(randList, parsedThing)
for (i in 1:length(randList[[1]])) {
print(randList[[1]][[i]] == parsedThing[[1]][[i]])
}
i<-3
randList[[1]][[i]] == parsedThing[[1]][[i]]
randList[[1]][[i]]
parsedThing[[1]][[i]]
Here's the abbreviated output:
> #floating point issue?
> identical(randList, parsedThing)
[1] FALSE
>
> for (i in 1:length(randList[[1]])) {
+ print(randList[[1]][[i]] == parsedThing[[1]][[i]])
+ }
[1] TRUE
[1] TRUE
[1] FALSE
[1] FALSE
[1] TRUE
[1] FALSE
[1] TRUE
[1] TRUE
[1] FALSE
[1] FALSE
...
>
> i<-3
> randList[[1]][[i]] == parsedThing[[1]][[i]]
[1] FALSE
>
> randList[[1]][[i]]
[1] 1.587845
> parsedThing[[1]][[i]]
[1] 1.587845
>
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