Simplified dput() in R

Question

I miss a way to add data to an SO answer in a transparent manner. My experience is that the structure object from dput() at times confuses inexperi

Answer 1

It might be worth mentioning memCompress and memDecompress here. For in-memory objects, it can reduce the size of large objects by compressing them as specified. And the latter reverses the compression. They're actually quite useful for package objects.

sum(nchar(dput(DF)))
# [1] 64
( mDF <- memCompress(as.character(DF)) )
# [1] 78 9c 4b d6 30 d2 51 80 20 33 1d 05 73 1d 05 0b 4d ae 64 0d 3f 47 1d 05 64 0c 14 b7 04 89 1b ea 28 18 eb 28 98 22 4b 6a 02 00 a8 ba 0c d2
length(mDF)
# [1] 46
cat(mdDF <- memDecompress(mDF, "gzip", TRUE))
# c(2, 2, 2, 6, 7, 8)
# c(NA, NA, NA, NA, 7, 9)
# c(1, 3, 5, NA, NA, NA)
nchar(mdDF)
# [1] 66

I haven't quite determined if the data frame can be reassembled easily, but I'm sure it can be.