2026-07-17 18:29 UTC
@ansate@social.coop R has data frames built in for storing tabular data. tibbles are a data structure developed by a third-party company that also store tabular data. They're a bit like R's built in data frames except when they aren't. To add further confusion, there's also the datatable package that implements a third tabular data structure that's less like built-in data frames, but is very fast.
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@zkamvar@hachyderm.io 2026-07-17 19:07
@geospacedman@mastodon.social @ansate@social.coop some ways tibbles (`tb`) differ from data frames (`df`): Tibbles don't drop dimensions by default. E.g. `tb[, 1]` is a 1-col tibble, but `df[, 1]` is a vector (From before R 4.0) tibbles don't convert strings to factors automatically Tibbles throw a warning if a column doesn't exist when you use `tb$nonexistantcolumnname` Tibbles have more compact default printing