tidy(dataframe) is deprecated? (broom packages)

General
#1 
tidy(iris)

this code return

var(if (is.vector(x) || is.factor(x)) x else as.double(x), na.rm = na.rm)

but

tidy(iris[,c(1,2,3,4)])

The above can be done without problems.

What are the criteria for deciding what to convert or not to convert?

Does it stop running if it contains factor and character?

#2

With your first example:

> tidy(iris)
Error in var(if (is.vector(x) || is.factor(x)) x else as.double(x), na.rm = na.rm) : 
  Calling var(x) on a factor x is defunct.

So the problem is the factor, and indeed the column Species that you remove is of class factor:

sapply(iris, class)
#> Sepal.Length  Sepal.Width Petal.Length  Petal.Width      Species 
#>    "numeric"    "numeric"    "numeric"    "numeric"     "factor"

The reason for that behavior I think is in the warning message:

Data frame tidiers are deprecated and will be removed in an upcoming release of broom.

So you're not supposed to use broom::tidy() on data frames anymore, and that problem won't be fixed. If you just want to transform a data frame in a tibble, you can use tidyr::tibble().

If what you were interested in were the summary statistics, alternatives include base::summary() and skimr::skim() (that gives a lot more information). Or to use your own call to dplyr::summarize(), which also makes more explicit what you're trying to obtain.

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