[R] diff-ing .rds files

[William Dunlap]

Your any-RDS-to-ASCII-converter could be the R function
   toASCIIRDS <- function (fromRDS, toRDS)
   {
      saveRDS(readRDS(fromRDS), file = toRDS, ascii = TRUE, compress = FALSE)
   }
which you  can call from Rscript with appropriate input and output file names.

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com


On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 12:18 PM, Will Hopper <wjhopper510 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the input Jeff and Burt, and I could have been more clear about
> what I was looking for.
>
> You are of course right that there is nothing preventing me from using
> plain text files, I initially went with compressed binary files because
> they were, of course, smaller.
>
> What I was curious about is if there was any existing
> program/script/function/tool that converted an rds to plain text, so that I
> could point git at it when creating the change set for a commit. For
> example, there are programs that convert pdf documents to plain text, and
> you can configure git to use these programs to convert the PDF's to plain
> text before comparing the current version with the version in the last
> commit, and then only add the things that have changes to the new commit.
> This allows you to the track changes to a pdf file the same way you would a
> text file, and your delta's don't blow up by committing the entire PDF file
> each time you change part of the file.
>
> It would be simple enough to write something like this with some
> combination of a shell script and an R script to do this same thing for
> .rds files, but I wondered if there was something out there already I was
> overlooking.
>
> I do see the point that I may be trying to compensate for a flawed premise,
> perhaps I should not use a .rds file here if I'm concerned about the repo
> getting too big as time goes on. I was just hoping to have my cake and eat
> it too.
>
> - Will
>
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 1:33 PM, Jeff Newmiller <jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us>
> wrote:
>
>> You are sending contradictory signals... do you or do you not want plain
>> text files? You have not indicated what advantage you are getting from
>> having binary files in your repository. By far the best answer I see to
>> your dilemma is to save in ASCII format instead of the default binary
>> format.
>>
>> On November 23, 2015 9:36:21 AM PST, 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!
>>>
>>>  [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
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>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
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>>>
>>>
>> --
>> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>>
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.