Re: [Gretl-devel] string-valued series

On Wed, 27 Feb 2019, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote: > On Tue, 26 Feb 2019, Artur T. wrote: > >>> - printing out an array of strings requires a loop if it has more >>> than 9 elements. In some cases, this is VERY inconvenient. I see two >>> way to go around this: either we introduce a "set" variable, which >>> replaces the hard-wired limit at 10 we have now (something like "set >>> arrayprint 20") or introduce an option to the print command >>> ("--full" or similar). What do you guys prefer? >> >> What about introducing another function named head() as in Python's >> pandas package? The user would call <head(x,n)> where >> - x is either a series, list, string array or matrix >> - n is an integer specifying to show the first 'n' entries (default: >> 5 or) >> >> The output is printed in column-format. >> >> Similarly, there exists the tail() function in pandas show the last n >> entries. >> >> This would also be helpful when working with huge datasets where >> printing output by <print x -o> already takes quite a while... > > That's a good idea, although I'm a bit wary of introducing new > cmmands. How about options to "print"? That is, for example, > > print X --head=10 > > would be equivalent to > > smpl 1 10 > print X --byobs > smpl full > > except it'd be more efficient in that we don't really perform the > subsampling. > > However, this would be ok when you print series/lists. The problem for > arrays would remain. Unless we generalise the above to something like > > print A --start=3 --stop=12 > > Do you like it?

I have a further suggestion to throw in the pot: how about print <object> --range=start:stop for series, lists, matrices and arrays. We could accept a negative value for start or stop as meaning count back from the end, and perhaps a blank start or stop field as meaning all the way in that direction.

We already have apparatus to parse such a specification for ranges of matrix rows/columns, which could probably be reused without too much difficulty.