The extractor functions try to do something sensible for any
matrix-like object x
. If the object has dimnames
the first component is used as the row names, and the second component
(if any) is used for the column names. For a data frame, rownames
and colnames
eventually call row.names
and
names
respectively, but the latter are preferred.
If do.NULL
is FALSE
, a character vector (of length
NROW(x)
or NCOL(x)
) is returned in any
case, prepending prefix
to simple numbers, if there are no
dimnames or the corresponding component of the dimnames is NULL
.
The replacement methods for arrays/matrices coerce vector and factor
values of value
to character, but do not dispatch methods for
as.character
.
For a data frame, value
for rownames
should be a
character vector of non-duplicated and non-missing names (this is
enforced), and for colnames
a character vector of (preferably)
unique syntactically-valid names. In both cases, value
will be
coerced by as.character
, and setting colnames
will convert the row names to character.