discoleo commented 1 year ago

Helper Function: format.time

The vignette Importing and Formatting Data starts with a lot of boiler-plate code, including: paste("Plate1-", paste(example_widedata_noiseless$Time %/% 3600, formatC((example_widedata_noiseless$Time %% 3600) %/% 60, width = 2, flag = 0), formatC((example_widedatanoiseless$Time %% 3600) %% 60, width = 2, flag = 0), sep = ""), ".csv", sep = "")

The time-formatting code could be moved to a helper function inside the package:

it would slightly clean the code in the vignette;
formatting time may be useful in other places as well: e.g. for titles/subtitles in plots: plot(..., sub = paste(format.time(range(_sometime)), collapse= " - "));

Note:

format.time: would have been useful as a base function in R as well (especially in biochemistry, cell biology);
the code is simple enough to include in the package, so external packages are not required;

R Code

# separator for plots = ":";
format.time = function(x, sep=":", h.width=2) {
   h  = x %/% 3600;
   ms = x %%  3600;
   if(h.width != 1) h = formatC(h, width = h.width, flag = 0);
   paste(h,
      formatC(ms %/% 60, width = 2, flag = 0),
      formatC(ms %% 60, width = 2, flag = 0), sep=sep);
}

discoleo commented 1 year ago

Vignette Introduction to using gcplyr

The first image (on page 2) could also benefit from this function:

x-axis: either to format the actual values on the axis or to change the labeling of the axis (or add as a sub-title);
- changing the values on the x-axis: will need to search the documentation of ggplot;
- axis label: ggplot(...) + xlab(format.time(range(_timevalues)));

I have enhanced in the meanwhile the initial format.time function:

added convenience argument: collapse = NULL;
added argument: s.drop = FALSE to be able to drop seconds;

The latest code can be found on my GitHub page, see: https://github.com/discoleo/R/blob/master/Stat/Tools.DateTime.R

Naming of Functions

Important advantage of format.time over formatTime or format_time:

using generic names for functions allows to search for all "format" functions loaded in R using:

methods(format)
even if the function is called explicitly as format.time(some_value), it still enables to search rapidly for a suitable "format" function;

mikeblazanin commented 8 months ago

Since these time-formatting steps in the vignetted have been moved into make_example (#132), the utility of implementing this is now very limited

mikeblazanin / gcplyr