DataMatrix - a Pythonic implementation of R's data.frame

(C) 2008 Luca Beltrame

(C) 2008 Giovanni Marco Dall'Olio

Contents

1. License

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1. License

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This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License

(GPL), version 2, or (at your option), any later version.

This means that you can freely modify, copy and distribute

the program, under the terms of said license. The COPYING file gives a good

overview of what you can and can't do.

Although we hope that this program will be useful, but it is without ANY 

WARRANTY, without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR 

A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

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2. Description

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DataMatrix is a Python module that tries to emulate the behavior of the 

"data.frame" data structure of the R programming language. Data.frames are 

essentially tables that can be queried either by row or columns, or, in the 

presence of a header, even by column names. 

DataMatrix emulates this behavior by reading a text file (or file-like object) 

into a dictionary which in turn contains lists (the columns of the table).

For each row in the original text file, the columns contain a two item tuple, 

whose first item is the "row name" and the second the actual value for that 

row and column. 

Row names are a way to identify a row precisely (R uses it because some of its

operations return the names of the rows rather than their values) and are either

read from a specific column or a progressive numeric value otherwise.

DataMatrix objects can be queried with a dictionary-like syntax (e.g., 

matrix["column name"]), or by other methods.

Detailed documentation is available in the HTML and PDF manuals, which can be 

found in PREFIX/share/doc/datamatrix (Linux) or C:\Python\Data\datamatrix

 (Windows).