[R] diff-ing .rds files

[Bert Gunter]

?dput  or ?dump perhaps.  (and dget() and source() )

I realize that these may not do what you want, but exactly what you
want is a bit unclear (to me, anyway) depending on exactly what your
saved results are.

Cheers,
Bert
Bert Gunter

"Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge
is certainly not wisdom."
   -- Clifford Stoll


On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 9:36 AM, Will Hopper <wjhopper510 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm posting to see if anyone knows of any existing resources that
> auto-magically converts r objects in saved in .rds files to a plain text
> representation, suitable for diffing?
>
> I often save the results of long running calculation as .rds files, and
> since I use git for source control, it would be nice if there were a way to
> convert rds files to a plain text representation for diffing, so I could
> avoid having large commits full of binary data. Git allows you specify a
> programs for binary --> text conversion for any file type, effectively
> teaching git how to diff binary files. If there was something out there
> developed to do this with .rds files, it would really like to know about it!
>
> I realize I could save the rds file with ascii=TRUE and compress=FALSE, but
> that kind of defeats the point of saving as .rds in the first place.
>
> If there is no tool out that there anyone knows of, I don't think it would
> be too hard for me to write something with bash + Rscript to get the job
> done, but I'd like to avoid re-inventing the wheel if possible.
>
> Thanks for the help!
>
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>
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