will rownames on tibbles become impossible in future?

[laserhedvig]

I often use non-tidyverse functions that work better with rownames, such as PCA or distance matrices. It's not impossible to avoid using rownames, but it's often handier (or I have just gotten into the habit ).

Now, when I wrangle parts of that data with tidy functions I get constantly reminded that rownames on tibbles are deprecated. I know and fully understand that:

* While a tibble can have row names (e.g., when converting from a regular data frame), they are removed when subsetting with the [ operator. A warning will be raised when attempting to assign non- NULL row names to a tibble. Generally, it is best to avoid row names, because they are basically a character column with different semantics to every other column.*

This isn't a problem for me, yet. However, if in future tibbles entirely refuse to have rownames at all and just drop them, that would be a problem. Is this a likely future?

[technocrat]

Well, the future is a potentially long time and by design tibbles are column-centric and always wlll be.

That said, you can still explicitly convert a row name to a column with rownames_to_columns.

But if that goes away, just create your vector of rownames, enframe it, and bind_cols(), the use

my_tib <- my_tib %>% select(my_rownames, everything()

[mara]

From the tibble 2.0.1 release notes/blog post:

tibble 2.0.1

Row names

Row name handling is stricter. Row names were never supported in tibble() and new_tibble() , and are now stripped by default in as_tibble() . The rownames argument to as_tibble() supports:

• NULL : remove row names (default),
• NA : keep row names,
• A string: the name of the new column that will contain the existing row names, which are no longer present in the result.

The old default can be restored by calling pkgconfig::set_config("tibble::rownames", NA), this also works for packages that import tibble .

Also some more detail in the NEWS file in the 2.0.0 breaking changes section:

tidyverse/tibble/blob/main/NEWS.md#breaking-changes

@laserhedvig

Is this a likely future?

My interpretation of the above is that there are workarounds for dealing with rownames in tibbles, but that rownames are sort of antithetical to the design of tibbles. I can't speak for the future in its entirety, but hopefully this info will give you some sense of how to keep your workflow robust.

[laserhedvig]

Thank you Mara that's good to know and a very helpful response!

I understand how the tidy philosophy doesn't make sense with rownames, all the same I do hope that column_to_rownames() will still be maintained. For certain kinds of analysis, especially distance matrices, rownames really do make sense.

[laserhedvig]

Thanks.

That's kind of what I'm already doing .I just wanted to check that rownames_to_column() and column_to_rownames() won't go away sometime in the future. I'm worried that rownames on Tibbles won't just be not encouraged but strictly prohibited. I know that as_tibble() strips them, but just running a df through any random tidyverse function (like select()) and getting a tibble output currently doesn't strip them off.. but the constant message I get about them being deprecated sort of makes it seem like they might start stripping them off always soon