Infinite values in dTable()

This short example shows how having Inf and -Inf values can break up the dTable() function in rCharts. The fix is simple: replace those values by some other large/small number respecitvely.

library(data.table)
library(rCharts)
library(knitr)
render_html()

Error

The following table does not because Inf and -Inf are not recognized by DataTables as shown in the browser console.

data <- data.frame(x = c(-Inf, Inf, 3, 4), y = letters[1:4])
t1 <- dTable(data.table(data), sPaginationType = "full_numbers", iDisplayLength = 100,
    sScrollX = "100%")
t1$print("error", cdn = TRUE)

Fix

The following function takes a data.frame and for the columns of interest it replaces the Inf and -Inf values by 1e100 and -1e100 respectively. The colsubset argument can be useful if your data.frame has columns that are not numeric.

replaceInf <- function(df, colsubset = seq_len(ncol(df))) {
    for (i in colsubset) {
        inf.idx <- !is.finite(df[, i])
        if (any(inf.idx)) {
            inf.sign <- sign(df[inf.idx, i])
            df[inf.idx, i] <- inf.sign * 1e+100
        }
    }
    return(df)
}
data2 <- replaceInf(data)

Fixed =)

Now the table is displayed =)

t2 <- dTable(data.table(data2), sPaginationType = "full_numbers", iDisplayLength = 100,
    sScrollX = "100%")
t2$print("fixed", cdn = TRUE)

Reproducibility

sessionInfo()

## R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16)
## Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)
## 
## 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] rCharts_0.3.52   data.table_1.8.8 knitr_1.4.1     
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] digest_0.6.3    evaluate_0.4.7  formatR_0.9     grid_3.0.1     
##  [5] highr_0.2.1     lattice_0.20-15 plyr_1.8        RJSONIO_1.0-3  
##  [9] stringr_0.6.2   tools_3.0.1     whisker_0.3-2   yaml_2.1.7