What is the best way to manage metadata in R? [dup

Question

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• How to create, structure, maintain and update data codebooks in R? 4 answers

In analyzing data the metadata about variables is extremely important. How do you manage this information in R?

For example, is there a way to specify a label that will be printed instead of the variable name?

What facilities are there in R for this?

Answer 1

Use the repo package. You can assign each variable a long name, a description, a set of tags, a remote url, dependency relations and also attach to it figures or generic external files. Find the latest stable release on CRAN (install.packages("repo")) or the latest development on github. A quick overview here. Hope it helps.

Answer 2

Quick suggestions that come to mind are

1. attributes to store data along with an object (as Frank Harrell has championed for a long time)
2. the comment() function can do parts of this
3. the whole gamut of object-orientation to achieve different printing behaviour etc