can_coerce: Check coercibility

Description

Checks if values are coercible to a given class. Because of inconsistencies in R's built-in coercion functions (e.g. as.numeric() warns when it introduces NAs but as.logical() doesn't; as.integer() will silently remove decimal places from numeric inputs) we check only for the specific coercions we want to allow, primarily allowing numeric, integer, or logical values to be considered valid even when the required type is character.

Usage

can_coerce(values, class)

Arguments

values

Vector of values to check

class

Class of interest

Value

Boolean value; TRUE if values are coercible to class, FALSE otherwise.

Details

This function is mainly in place so that we can automatically allow numeric read lengths, pH values, etc., which are defined as strings in our annotation vocabulary but can reasonably be numbers.

Additionally, this function will return TRUE if the values are integers and the desired class is numeric, and will return TRUE if the values are numeric but are whole numbers. 2.0 is considered coercible to integer, but 2.1 is not.

It will also allow the following capitalizations of boolean values: true, True, TRUE, false, False, FALSE. These are all treated as valid booleans by Synapse.

This function will not affect validation of enumerated values, regardless of their class. It is only used when validating annotations that have a required type but no enumerated values.

Examples

Run this code

# NOT RUN {
# Not run because function is not exported
# }
# NOT RUN {
# Coercible:
can_coerce(1, "character")
can_coerce(TRUE, "character")
can_coerce(1L, "character")
can_coerce(1L, "numeric")
can_coerce(1.0, "integer")

# Not coercible:
can_coerce("foo", "numeric")
can_coerce("foo", "logical")
can_coerce(2.5, "integer")
# }