[R] Weird change in behavior of summary() function

[John Helly]

Aloha.

I have been using the summary function (i.e., summary()) for years and, 
in the last few weeks, suddenly find it behaving in an obviously 
erroneous way.  I expect the DAUCO summary to be summary of the 
character variable but it has these weird NULL:00125 values listed for 
whatever the number of rows is.

It's not limited to this input data so I don't believe that it is 
data-dependent at this point.

This just started happening a number of weeks ago.  I've done some 
updates of the OS and apps since then and re-installed R from the Mac 
*.dmg distro.

I have provided details below and my main questions are 1) has anyone 
else seen this (I can't find any reports of it) and 2) how might I debug 
this?

Thank you.

================ Input data sample (first few records from a flat ASCII 
csv file) ================

DAUCO,Longitude,Latitude,Precipitation,Year,Month
00125,-121.416666667,41.9583333334,63.1469993591,1895,1
00125,-121.375,41.9583333334,63.6969985962,1895,1
00125,-121.333333333,41.9583333334,65.7460021973,1895,1
00125,-121.291666667,41.9583333334,69.4150009155,1895,1
00125,-121.25,41.9583333334,74.0780029297,1895,1

================ R commands and output 
=============================================
PRISM        = read.table(PRISM_INPUT,header=TRUE, sep=',',
colClasses=c('character','numeric','numeric','numeric','numeric','numeric'))

 > summary(PRISM)
   DAUCO         Longitude         Latitude Precipitation         
Year          Month
  NULL:00125   Min.   :-121.4   Min.   :41.54   Min.   :  0.00 Min.   
:1895   Min.   : 1.000
  NULL:00125   1st Qu.:-121.2   1st Qu.:41.71   1st Qu.: 10.65 1st 
Qu.:1926   1st Qu.: 3.000
  NULL:00125   Median :-121.0   Median :41.79   Median : 24.41 Median 
:1957   Median : 6.000
  NULL:00125   Mean   :-121.0   Mean   :41.79   Mean   : 31.09 Mean   
:1957   Mean   : 6.488
  NULL:00125   3rd Qu.:-120.9   3rd Qu.:41.88   3rd Qu.: 43.73 3rd 
Qu.:1989   3rd Qu.: 9.000
  NULL:00125   Max.   :-120.6   Max.   :41.96   Max.   :265.08 Max.   
:2020   Max.   :12.000
  NULL:00125
  NULL:00125

 > dput(head(PRISM))
structure(list(DAUCO = c("00125", "00125", "00125", "00125",
"00125", "00125"), Longitude = c(-121.416666667, -121.375, -121.333333333,
-121.291666667, -121.25, -121.208333333), Latitude = c(41.9583333334,
41.9583333334, 41.9583333334, 41.9583333334, 41.9583333334, 41.9583333334
), Precipitation = c(63.1469993591, 63.6969985962, 65.7460021973,
69.4150009155, 74.0780029297, 80.4290008545), Year = c(1895,
1895, 1895, 1895, 1895, 1895), Month = c(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)), row.names = 
c(NA,
6L), class = "data.frame")
 >
 > sessionInfo()
R version 4.0.3 (2020-10-10)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Catalina 10.15.7

Matrix products: default
BLAS: 
/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.0/Resources/lib/libRblas.dylib
LAPACK: 
/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.0/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods base

other attached packages:
[1] reshape_0.8.8 plyr_1.8.6    ggplot2_3.3.2

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
  [1] Rcpp_1.0.4.6          pillar_1.4.4 DEoptimR_1.0-8        
compiler_4.0.3        RColorBrewer_1.1-2
  [6] iterators_1.0.12      digest_0.6.25 lifecycle_0.2.0       
tibble_3.0.1          gtable_0.3.0
[11] nlme_3.1-149          lattice_0.20-41 pkgconfig_2.0.3       
rlang_0.4.6           foreach_1.5.0
[16] Matrix_1.2-18         parallel_4.0.3 ergm_3.10.4           
coda_0.19-3           withr_2.2.0
[21] dplyr_1.0.0           generics_0.0.2 vctrs_0.3.1           
networkDynamic_0.10.1 trust_0.1-8
[26] grid_4.0.3            tidyselect_1.1.0 deSolve_1.28          
robustbase_0.93-6     glue_1.4.1
[31] R6_2.4.1              farver_2.0.3 purrr_0.3.4           
magrittr_1.5          codetools_0.2-16
[36] scales_1.1.1          ellipsis_0.3.1 MASS_7.3-53           
lpSolve_5.6.15        colorspace_1.4-1
[41] ape_5.4               labeling_0.3 network_1.16.0        
lazyeval_0.2.2        doParallel_1.0.15
[46] EpiModel_1.8.0        munsell_0.5.0 tergm_3.6.1           
statnet.common_4.3.0  crayon_1.3.4




-- 
John Helly, University of California, San Diego / San Diego Supercomputer Center / Scripps Institution of Oceanography / 760 840 8660 mobile / http://www.sdsc.edu/~hellyj
ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3779-0603